


aberration

by cocoartist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Hermione Granger, Boarding School, Bullying, Draco Malfoy is a Little Shit, Drama & Romance, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Gryffindor vs. Slytherin Rivalry, Harry Potter is Bad at Feelings, Hate to Love, Hermione Granger is Bad at Feelings, Hermione is a Slytherin, Hogwarts Era, Humour, Mutual Pining, Power Dynamics, Slytherin Hermione Granger, Slytherins Being Slytherins, Teen Romance, The Author Regrets Nothing, excessive use of the word mudblood, eye fucking really, historical determinism, lingering staring, lots of bitchy banter, lots of staring, nothing changes and everything changes, slowburn, this is not a dramione
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29980422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cocoartist/pseuds/cocoartist
Summary: Hermione Granger hates Harry Potter just as much as the next Slytherin. Until she doesn't.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter, Minor or Background Relationship(s), also some hermione/viktor and some very limited dramione
Comments: 217
Kudos: 263





	1. just like the rest of them

Albus Dumbledore is unsettled. He has been anticipating this specific sorting ceremony for many years, but he has not anticipated this specific twist. 

The last time a child was sorted into Slytherin without known magical parents had been 1938. Albus still doesn’t know what lies that surly orphan had told his house to silence any questions. And yes, certainly, other children without a Wizarding surname have been sent down to the dungeons - its current Head of House for one - but they were half-bloods. All the ones he can remember. This child is different. She is bright-eyed and curious and desperate to prove herself, and she has Muggle ancestry on both sides of her family. This child, he thinks, could be trouble. 

Albus Dumbledore exchanges a quick look with Severus Snape and sees very little in those dark eyes to give away the man’s thoughts. Later, he extracts a promise from him to keep an eye on her and warn of any trouble brewing. But months pass and then a year and the Granger girl does not show any sign of a troublesome disposition. She’s an isolated child who buries her loneliness in her books. She is rather too precocious and she attracts some teasing from her peers. But she doesn’t seem dangerous. Albus Dumbledore lets his attention slide away, back to more important things, and forgets about the aberration. 

  
  
  
  
i.

Hermione Granger doesn’t know why she was put in Slytherin. She knows what the Sorting Hat told her and she knows what she’s read but she doesn’t really get it.

It’s made abundantly clear from her first night she is unwelcome. The lesson is repeated regularly. Variation keeps it fresh. She never knows where the humiliation will come from, never knows whether it will be words or spells or or feigned friendship or destroyed belongings or disturbed sleep. She is given salutary lessons about blood, but when they make hers run it is rich and dark red just the same as anyone’s. Only Crabbe is stupid enough to have expected it to be brown. 

At first she fights back, just like her parents told her. It’s hard when there’s seventy of them and one of you but she squares her small shoulders and tries to look them in the eye. 

But Hermione Granger is made to realise pretty quickly that standing up to primary school bullies and standing up to people who can inflict agonising damage and vanish the traces, people who don’t just find her annoying but a threat to their very way of life, who really _hate_ her for what she is, those are not the same. This is not bullying. It’s something else. It is implacable and fundamental. 

So she learns to survive. She keeps her head down. She learns everything she can. She keeps her hand down in lessons. She spends most of her time in the library. She earns house points for her essays and when she’s called on. But she vanishes into the background. And she watches. Eventually Hermione Granger becomes boring. 

Draco Malfoy turns his attention to Harry Potter, and Pansy Parkinson turns her attention on Draco Malfoy though not, exactly, in the same way. 

  
  


ii. 

Second year is worse. It has hardly started when the caretaker's cat is petrified and someone writes a message on the wall that both terrifies and delights the worst of her house. 

“You’ll be first in line, Mudblood,” Malfoy tells her. His pale face is flushed with excitement and not a little fear. “Sure you don’t want to go back where you belong?” 

Hermione Granger has cowered silently for a year. She had thought she knew what it was to be scared. But as she stares at the cat dangling on the wall, she thinks _this is different_. 

The next one is a Mudblood just like her. A first year. She doesn’t even know his name. She goes to the library and every step is an exercise in courage. 

One day she trips over something outside the Slytherin dungeons and it turns out to be Harry Potter and his ginger friend under an invisibility cloak. It’s late, probably past curfew. She can’t believe they have a cloak. It seems monstrously unfair when she, Hermione, is always in need of a way to vanish.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, as disdainfully as she can, as she gets up. Harry Potter is the number one suspect for most of the school since he spoke to that snake in duelling club. Hermione supposes it’s possible, certainly it has annoyed the Slytherins endlessly not knowing who it is. But she also thinks he goes around looking almost as beaten down as she feels and he doesn’t seem very interested in murder. 

“None of your business,” spits the red-head. 

“Are you trying to break into the dungeons?” she asks, working it out. “Looking for the Heir are you?” 

Harry Potter looks surprisingly relieved at this. 

“Yeah,” he says, “will you let us in?” 

“No,” she says. She doesn’t explain. Slytherin might bully Hermione and loathe Hermione and make her feel like she doesn’t belong but the older Slytherins - who freely turn their wand on her - also protect her from other houses sometimes. Life is bad, but it could be worse, and letting Harry Potter into the dungeon is about as bad a betrayal as she could make. Besides this stupid boy isn’t offering her anything in return. 

“But it’s Malfoy right?” he asks excitedly. “Have you seen him. Has -?”

“ _Malfoy?_ ” she asks scathingly. “You think _Malfoy_ would be the heir without going around and telling everyone? Go and look at the Genealogy books in the library if you want to find out if Malfoy’s the heir you idiot.” 

“The what books?” 

“Genealogy. Books of lineage. None of the kids in Slytherin can claim any sort of direct descent.” It’s _so nice_ to be able to let her sharp tongue out on these idiots. Hermione wonders if she’s the only logical person to have ever entered Hogwarts. 

Ron Weasley starts to snap back but she interrupts. 

“It’s not Malfoy, I wouldn’t still be walking around if it was. You should both be in bed. Now go away so I can get into the dungeons.” 

Naturally they refuse to be dismissed so easily so Hermione puts them both in a body-bind, levitates them into an empty classroom, covers them with the cloak, and leaves them to enjoy a cold hour or two lying on the stone floor to regret being rude to her. 

  
  


She doesn’t work it out until halfway through May. Despite Draco Malfoy’s warning, Hermione is not the first, second, or even third Muggleborn to be petrified. She isn’t petrified at all. By this time there’s talk of closing the school and even the Slytherins are thoroughly fed up with the attacks. No one wants Hogwarts to close except, perhaps, Hermione herself, who thinks longingly that being forced to go to Beauxbatons or Ilvermorny without admitting defeat at Hogwarts would be quite nice. But she does not want to be petrified - or worse - and so she has spent hours in the library looking up causes of petrification. There are, in turns out, hundreds of ways to petrify someone using magic. Several of them even require mandrakes to reverse the effects. 

But only one cause of petrification involves a rare snake that lives for hundreds of years. Snakes are everywhere in Slytherin House and if you look closely at the tapestries and engravings and lamps and other reptilian decor, they’re not all ordinary snakes. Some are the King of Serpents.

A basilisk’s stare: the only thing that can petrify or kill.

And Harry Potter can talk to snakes. 

“Potter,” she calls out. She’s been trying to get to him for days. She doesn’t know what she thinks, but she knows she needs to see his face when she says the word _basilisk_. 

She has followed him into a bathroom. It’s disgusting, much worse than the girls bathrooms, and she wonders why magic isn’t better applied. But any moment now a boy could come in. She must be fast.

He turns, surprised. She’s pulled her wand out and he mirrors her. 

“It’s a basilisk,” she says without explanation. He looks baffled and lowers wand a little. “Honestly don’t you read? A basilisk. That’s what’s hurting people. A great big snake and _you’re the only one who can talk to them._ ”

Her wand is at his throat now. She’s been angry, she realises, angry all year. Angry that she’d be a target just for who her parents are. Angry that the useless teachers can’t protect them. Angry that she’s so alone and so scared all the time. 

Potter glares at her. 

“It’s NOT ME,” he yells. “I don’t know why I can speak to them, but it’s _not me_. I’m not the heir. I’m trying to stop it!”

Hermione believes him. He looks frustrated and helpless and scared. Any minute now a boy could come in and see her talking to Harry Potter in the loos and then she might as well stare straight as the basilisk. 

“Fine,” she hisses and throws the page she’s torn out of the library book in his face before turning around and leaving the room. She calls back over her shoulder, getting a mirror out of her bag. “ _Don’t_ tell anyone I was here.” 

She feels awful for having ripped the page out, but she’d hardly have been able to carry _Fantastick Beastes_ around with her for days while she tried to escape the new restrictions and get him alone. The basilisk isn’t in the modern edition. She’d found it in a first edition of the extended encyclopaedia, in vol. i (a-d). It’s illustrated and weighs as much as all her schoolbooks for a day of classes put together. 

_Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken’s egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are most wondrous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it._

“The pipes,” Potter exclaims as the door swings shut behind her. “It’s in the -”

She doesn’t know what he’ll do. Hopefully go and tell Dumbledore and take credit for the whole thing. She goes to lunch and slides into her seat right at the end of the second year section, next to Tracey Davies the half-blood, and hopes no one else gets hurt. 

The next day Ginny Weasley disappears, and by that evening Harry Potter has saved the day in some sort of baffling adventure that warrants a last-minute feast, wins four hundred points for Gryffindor, and makes Draco Malfoy so angry he can’t see straight for days. 

She corners Potter again a few days after the celebration. He’s been visiting the groundskeeper. She puts her wand at his throat - again. He is so exuberantly happy he doesn’t bother drawing his this time.

In the soft golden light of the summer evening his eyes are very green. She says if he ever lets anyone know she told him about the basilisk she’ll find one to set on him. She lists a complicated and well-rehearsed range of other threats including detailing just how easy it would be to make him confess his undying love to Malfoy in the middle of the next Quidditch match before setting his own broomstick on fire.

“I won’t tell anyone, Granger. But aren’t you glad it’s all over?” Potter asks, curiously.

“I wish they’d closed this horrible school,” she says. “Maybe they would have if that girl had died.”

She doesn’t mean that, not really, but it’s satisfying to see the joy bleed out of his face anyway.

  
  


iii.

In the summer before her third year Hermione sees a cat. It is bowlegged and orange and beautiful, and she knows if she takes it back to Hogwarts it will end up hurt. She leaves it in the shop, regretfully, and goes to buy her textbooks. 

Third year is boring. Slytherin has become accustomed, if not reconciled, to its mudblood aberration. She can do most of the spells in the OWL textbooks already. She has no friends at school and just a few outside. All she ever does is study, even in the holidays. She gets perfect marks on her essays but she never puts her hand up in class. Magic is the only thing that makes sticking out this terrible place worthwhile. 

But she knows now there’s nothing they can do to her to make her leave, and the Slytherins seem to mostly know it too. Besides there are first years to bully and she is a boring target. She learned not to cry or fight back a long time ago. Outside her own year they simply pretend she doesn’t exist. 

Hermione hates Hogwarts. But she loves magic and so she stays. She is desperately, desperately unhappy. It’s a dull ache that grows with every passing day. She hardly even notices when the dementors are near. 

Remus Lupin asks her to stay behind one day. He gives her back an essay, tells her she’s very clever and then asks her why she’s hiding. She tells him, without elaborating, that she’s a Muggleborn in Slytherin. The lines that make him look so much older than he is (she knows how old she is; she’s looked him up in the yearbooks, in other archives, she’s not making the Lockhart mistake again) deepen. 

“Sometimes,” he offers thoughtfully, “snakes bite when they are trodden on.” 

She eyes him warily, this shabby former Gryffindor with his kind, sad eyes. 

“Is that what you did? I know what you are, you know, Snape’s been trying to get us to notice so subtly he might as well have just told us.” 

He looks floored for a moment. 

“No, I found strength in numbers worked better for me. But if that’s not an option… well, you’re the brightest witch of your age I’ve ever met Hermione. I’m sure you can come up with something to make your days a bit easier than just keeping your head down.” 

Hermione thinks she might burn up with the praise. She can feel it seizing her. She knows it’s weak, knows she shouldn’t be so easily flattered. She’s spent two and a half years trying to stamp the need out of herself. But it hasn’t worked, not completely. 

“Th-thank you,” she stammers. 

He offers her some chocolate and tells her he’s stepping out of the room and absolutely not to borrow the book on his desk because he can’t be responsible for teaching students that sort of thing. He winks when he says it. She makes a copy of the book to leave behind. It’s blank of course, all books have charms on them to stop cheap reproductions, and writes _Thank you_ inside. She vanishes before he gets back. 

The book is full of nasty little hexes and jinxes and their counter spells. There’s nothing in the library quite like it outside of the restricted section and that tends to leap too far from conjuring frogs to making people’s skin turn inside out. 

This is different. Lupin has written a note on the title page. It’s a warning. It tells her that cruelty isn’t strength. But it doesn’t say what she saw in his face, what she knows in her heart. Magic makes the world more brutal, more dangerous, more wild. She feels a little shiver of excitement roll down her spine as she begins to read. 

Hermione hasn’t spent two-and-a-half years in Slytherin House without learning a few things about power. She knows the quickest way to make things better would be to trounce the most powerful person and make everyone afraid of her. But she also knows the worst thing would be to fight a battle she can’t win. So she starts small. She starts domestic. She starts with Pansy. 

Every time Pansy makes a cruel jibe in the dormitories, she gets a spot. She doesn’t link them to Hermione for days. She doesn’t, until they move off her face and onto her chest. Hermione wants her face to look natural. Everyone can see that. 

It’s not that Pansy’s greatest fear is that she’s ugly. She isn’t, but she isn’t beautiful like Daphne Greengrass. Pansy’s problem is that she’s weak and she’s afraid and she likes power. Mostly that comes out as her being mean. She’s the meanest girl in the year and meaner than the year above. 

Hermione knows Pansy’s type of mean is smart but it’s also just swagger and bravado. She’s been watching and waiting and she’s seen the girl’s shoulders sag when she gets a letter from home. She’s watched her eyes follow Draco around the common room, watched her coo over him when he pretended his arm was hurt. 

Hermione also knows that Draco Malfoy is a clever, crass boy who’s never seen someone else’s weakness without wanting to poke it, and he does all the work for her in the end. 

They’re in Potions with Gryffindor and Pansy’s been stuck with Millicent as a partner because she was late, trying to hide the pimples in the bathroom between lessons. 

“Draco,” Pansy demands his attention with something only slightly less than her usual bravado. She’s got her chin up and if Hermione hadn’t heard her crying in the mirror that morning she’d never know the spots were bothering her, never know she’d tried six different balms and four spells to try to hide them. 

When Pansy is older she’ll learn not to try to wield her power over men publicly. But she’s twelve and she knows it’s weakened, and so she makes a stupid move. 

“Make Goyle swap with Mille and be my partner?” It’s more of an order than a question. 

Draco sneers at her. 

“Not a chance, barnacle face.” 

There’s a moment of stunned silence before the room breaks out into giggles. No one has escaped Pansy’s poisoned tongue, and so there is no one there who isn’t glad to see her fall. 

She glances around and because Hermione isn’t laughing, she pauses on her face, like a sailor finding shelter in a storm. Hermione tilts her head, and smiles.   
  


Later, like any wounded animal, Pansy lashes out. She does it in the dorm. She still hasn’t worked it out, still hasn’t made the connection between her skin and Hermione. Why would she? Hermione’s been so very careful. 

“Mudblood,” she hisses, “check my charms essay.” 

Hermione has done this before, to buy herself peace. But now she ignores Pansy. All the girls are in the dorm, all ready for bed. It’s almost time for lights out. 

Their beds are ranked by their importance: three against one wall and two against the other wall facing the gaps left in between. Pansy’s is furthest from the door, by the window to the lake. Daphne is opposite. Then Millicent, facing the same way as Pansy, then half-blood Tracey who has never learned not to yearn for Pansy’s approval next to Daphne but also near to the door. Hermione is last, right beside the door. 

Hermione has her hand on her wand. Her bed hangings are open, but her face is hidden. She murmurs the familiar spell quietly. More spots slide onto Pansy. 

“No,” she says calmly, and turns the page of her book. She can see Tracey’s disbelieving, scared smile across the room. Daphne lowers the magazine she’s reading. She can’t see the other two. Pansy gets up. Her wand is drawn and she is shaking and Hermione feels a strange sort of calm come over herself. She feels _brave_. 

“What did you say to me, Mudblood?” she hisses. Pansy should know more about power, Hermione thinks, than to think trampling on _her_ will restore hers. But Pansy is only a spoiled, insecure girl who’s been humiliated for the first time. 

“I said, 'no I won’t check your charms essay,’” Hermione repeats cooly. 

She’s expecting it and so she is so much quicker than Pansy with a wand that the shield charm is up before whatever lame hex the girl has cast can touch her. 

“What’s that on your chest, Pansy?” she asks. There’s faux concern in her voice, but Pansy isn’t stupid enough to look down. Until Millicent, big, lumbering Millicent who’s been on the wrong side of Pansy’s particular brand of viciousness before echoes Hermione. 

“What _is_ that?” Just over the top of her old-fashioned white nightdress a new line of spots peek up. She can’t see them but the others can. Daphne gets out of bed, and crosses to her. She murmurs an exclamation and Pansy goes to the mirror and pulls her nightgown down.

The spots spell out a word. They are red and slightly blistered and stark against her porcelain skin: UGLY. 

Pansy bursts into angry tears. 

“YOU?” she screams at Hermione. “You did this? How _dare you?”_

“I think we’ve all had quite enough of you,” Hermione says. She relishes the moment, the power of it. “Shut up and go to bed, barnacle face.” 

Millicent laughs. 

Pansy turns on her heel and runs out of the room. She doesn’t return that night. Hermione learns, later, that she spent it in the hospital wing. 

Madam Pomfrey’s tonics help but they can’t get the marks to go away completely. Pansy tries threats and she tries reprisals and after a week of war she comes to Hermione when she’s alone in the dormitory. She’s learned one lesson, at least, about taking her on publicly. 

“What do I have to do to get you to make them go away?” she asks. Her face is miserable and she looks beaten and her eyes are full of hate. 

“Swear on your magic you’ll never call me Mudblood again,” Hermione tells her. “And that you’ll leave me alone from now on. And, trade beds with me.” 

“No chance, Mudblood,” Pansy hisses. 

Hermione flicks her wand, deliberately obvious. Her mouth doesn’t move. She’s practiced this. More spots appear. 

“Look at your arms, Pansy,” she says. She is smiling. She is glad. She feels brave.

  
The other girl stares down at them as more spots appear. 

“They’ll be there forever you know,” Hermione tells her. “And they’ll spread _everywhere_. I’m the only one who can make them go away. And I know much worse things than this.” 

She doesn’t actually think it is true about the spots. They’d fade in time and she’s sure St Mungo’s would be able to heal the girl. She’s not that powerful. But Pansy is panicking. 

“Alright,” she says miserably. “You bushy-haired buck toothed _bitch_.” 

  
  
When the other girls come to the dorm that night, Hermione is lying reading on the bed by the lake window. She has arranged herself casually, carelessly. Daphne comes in last, pauses, reads the room. The curtains around Hermione’s old bed are closed and Pansy’s muffled sobs are still coming from behind them. Just barely. But Pansy doesn’t know how to silence them. Hermione doesn’t look up from her book. 

“Are you ready for lights out, Granger?” Daphne asks. Pansy is always the one who has decreed when the lights go out in the dorm. 

“Not yet,” Hermione tells her. 

Daphne is cleverer than Millicent and much cleverer than Tracey. If there’s going to be a challenge it will come from her. But Daphne gets into bed without another word and opens a magazine. 

The next morning, when Hermione has finished getting dressed, the other four girls follow her to breakfast and for the first time sit around her. Pansy’s skin is white and unblemished and her eyes are defeated. Hermione knows she’ll forget the lesson eventually and come for her in some way. But it won’t be easy, not with the vow she’s made. 

Theo Nott notices first. He’s the cleverest boy in their year and the quietest. Hermione meets his eyes and enjoys the slight gape of his mouth before it closes into a smirk. She’s tempted to order Pansy to pass her something, but she thinks she shouldn’t push her luck. She’s surprised, then, when Millicent offers her the dish of sausages first. 

Malfoy sits down flanked by his goons. She eyes them. They were a stupid choice. She returns to her newspaper. Crabbe and Goyle were intimidating before anyone had learned any magic but now they’re just dumb muscle and they make him braver than he should be. One day, Hermione thinks, she’ll show him that. But not yet. She’s not ready yet. She’s good at magic - but she knows from DADA she’s weaker when she’s put on the spot. 

Hermione watches him notice over the newspaper she is pretending to read. But Malfoy knows enough about Slytherin hierarchy not to interfere with the girls. Besides he’s too busy obsessively hating Harry Potter to care much for house politics. His eyes move around the group, register surprise, and then he turns away. 

In a way, she supposes, it bolsters his own position: he weakened Pansy who could have been a threat to his overall supremacy in their year if she’d wanted to. But Draco Malfoy can’t be seen endorsing a Mudblood. So he ignores the whole thing completely and when he talks to the girls it’s to Daphne and Millicent. He rarely acknowledges Pansy. She has been bested by a Mudblood and everyone knows it. She’d have to do something very sly indeed to regain her footing. 

Hermione becomes a little less invisible. She laughs along with everyone else when Malfoy imitates Potter fainting. She goes to Hogsmeade. She starts raising her hand occasionally in classes, especially in Defence Against the Dark Arts. She works harder for Professor Lupin than any other teacher, pushing herself to her considerable best. 

Professor Lupin, she thinks, is the first and only person who has ever helped her in the magical world. She finds excuses to help him. She cleans his Grindylow tank and deflects attention from his regular absences. She writes the most brilliant essays. 

But it’s not enough. He’s respectful, even fond, of her. But he _loves_ Harry Potter. And she can’t work out why. Harry Potter who gets special attention from everyone, even Snape even if she wouldn’t trade that particular brand of special attention for the world. Harry Potter who faints because of Dementors. Lupin tries to hide it, but Hermione survives by watching people and she can see it. Potter doesn’t even notice. 

When that stupid little boy conjures a Patronus - a real, magnificent Patronus - at the Quidditch match later in the year and she sees the look of beaming pride on Professor Lupin’s face she realises that _he_ had taught Potter that spell. That Potter has been getting special secret lessons with Lupin because Potter is pathetic enough to faint when a dementor goes near him. She is so jealous she thinks she’s going to be sick. 

And it’s Potter’s fault - of course it is, _of course_ \- that the entire school gets disrupted over and over again that year. Some madman is trying to kill him, and Hermione wishes they’d get on with it so she can have some peace. 

She tells him this one day in the corridor. He looks genuinely shocked and she wonders how he’s survived so much and remained so soft. 

  
  
  


Something happens at the end of the year. It’s something to do with Potter and Lupin and Snape and whatever it is drives her Head of House wild with anger, wild enough to announce to the Slytherins what she worked out months earlier. 

Professor Lupin is a werewolf. 

“Just _wait_ until my father hears about this,” Malfoy says as the Slytherins gather to head to Hogsmeade. He’s never liked Lupin. “Mind you I hear he’s already on his way out.”

Hermione didn’t care about going to the village that weekend anyway. She goes back into the dorm to wait until they’ve all left the Common Room and then rushes up to the third floor. 

She bumps into Harry Potter on the stairs coming off the corridor that leads to Lupin’s office. She’s not crying. She’s learned not to cry in three years in Slytherin, even if she feels like her one ally in the school - in the world - is deserting her. 

“This is your fault, Potter,” she hisses at him. He looks up, startled, from the raggedy old piece of parchment he’s holding. 

“What is?” 

“I don’t know what you did last night,” she says, thinking what a spoiled and stupid boy he must be, “but I know it’s your fault Lupin’s going.”

“He’s already gone,” Harry Potter tells her. There’s something bitter in his voice she’s never heard before and his emerald green eyes are blazing. “And it’s not _my_ fault, it’s Snape’s, which you’d know if you weren’t a little snake just like the rest of them.” 


	2. you're very brave all of a sudden

A new year brings a new dorm - and a new battle over the beds. Pansy has had a long summer of coddling to forget what she learned the year before and when she gets upstairs after the feast she tells Hermione to move. But Hermione, who has learned all the secret passageways she can to help her dodge her housemates, has got upstairs faster and she is casually stacking books on her bedside table when the others arrive. Her back is to the door. It’s deliberate. It’s a show of strength. She’s charmed a hidden mirror into the bed hangings so she can see behind her. 

“You’re in my bed, Granger. Didn’t you read the papers after the World Cup? Your kind _isn’t welcome here_.” 

Pansy starts screaming before Hermione has even turned around. By the time she does, she’s on the floor. It’s just a nightmare jinx. But Pansy takes magic for granted. Pansy doesn’t push herself. Pansy has not needed to survive. 

“Do you really want to go through all this again?” she asks the other girl when she lifts it. “I can do so much worse.” 

Hermione wonders if this counts as bullying. She doesn’t think so. She’d never attack unprovoked. Pansy fires a spell at her and Hermione steps aside easily. It sparks when it hits the window and fizzles out. 

“Oh get up, Parkinson, you pathetic excuse for a witch.” 

She can’t believe it’s that easy, but it is. Pansy goes to the third best bed. Millicent glares at her, but there’s some Pureblood understanding that means she acquiesces and it’s up to Tracey Davies to settle miserably into the bed by the door. 

“I could teach you know,” Hermione says after a moment. She’s still holding her wand, casually as she can, with her arms crossed. 

Pansy’s head shoots round. 

“Get lost,” she says. But Hermione can tell she’s curious. She smirks. She’s practiced it all summer and she can see it works on Pansy at least. She hexes her again in the middle of the night, just to make sure. 

Hermione watches in utter, furious disbelief when Harry Potter gets named Hogwarts Champion. She rarely speaks at the dining table, and so she doesn’t voice her thought that he probably _didn’t_ put his name in. It doesn’t matter. He’s still been made an exception for - again. 

And when she finds Malfoy in the common room poking his wand at some badges she doesn’t slide quietly up to her room. He’s the only one in there. Everyone else is in bed. Hermione was the last student in the library and the rare sight of Draco Malfoy toiling over something pulls her up short. 

“What are you doing?” she asks, curiously. 

“None of your business, Mudblood.” 

Hermione has been called it so much now it slides off with only a wince of the pain she’s buried very deep. 

“Potter Blinks?” she reads. “Very witty, Malfoy. I’m sure he’ll be devastated.” 

Malfoy looks up at her sharply. Interestedly. 

“You’re very brave all of a sudden,” he remarks. 

“If I wasn’t brave, I’d have left after the first night,” she points out. “Give it here, let me have a look. What spell is this? A Hastron charm?” 

“Merlin you’re such a little swot aren’t you,” he says but he hands it over. She sits opposite him and examines it. “I bought them from a joke shop. You’re supposed to be able to get them to say whatever you want but it’s not working.” 

She examines it and tries a couple of things. 

“Maybe they’re faulty. I’ll start from scratch. Gemino.” The badge duplicates and she hands the one Malfoy has been working on back to him. It now says _BLOTTER WINKS._

“Were you really going for POTTER STINKS?” she says, slightly awed at his childishness. For someone so cleverly vicious he isn’t that creative. 

“Simple but effective,” he murmurs. “Can’t be too bad or they’d get confiscated.” 

Hermione glances up, impressed for a moment. That is well-reasoned, but she doesn’t tell him that. She uses a basic charm and luminous letters appear on the badge. They’re cramped, so she makes it big enough until it’s clear: 

_SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY, THE REAL HOGWARTS CHAMPION._

“That’ll bother him more,” she says. “All that orphany need to _belong_.” 

Malfoy bursts out laughing. 

“Well well well,” he says. “Maybe you’re not just a useless little swot after all. I still want it to say Potter Stinks though. Maybe it could change. What spell did you use?” 

She teaches him and they try a few spells to make the lettering change. When he’s made a few copies he hands her the first one. 

“Wear it to Potions tomorrow,” he tells her. “Merlin, I can’t fucking wait to see his stupid face.” 

Hermione despises the leap of pleasure she gets. There’s a small part of her that whispers _it takes one to know one_ when she thinks of Potter’s desperation to be accepted. But that’s it, exactly: Malfoy is offering her something no one else can: recognition that she is a Slytherin. That’s all it is. And tomorrow she’ll be one of them, instead of just the girl who doesn’t belong anywhere. 

She takes the badge, and leaves Malfoy in the common room making copies. 

Hermione sees Malfoy wearing his at lunch. It’s blank but he’s clearly ready. She pins hers on too and it catches Pansy’s eye. 

“What’s that?” she says, sharply, looking between them. Malfoy is handing one to Zabini.

“Here you go Parkinson,” Malfoy says, handing her one. “Everyone gets one.”

Hermione ignores her. The message was clear enough. She, Hermione, has been included in Malfoy’s prank before anyone else. Before the boys, and before Pansy. She eats her shepherd’s pie in silence and lets the other girl stew. 

The prank isn’t that funny. Everyone else thinks it is. Hermione thinks it’s juvenile. But it pisses Harry Potter off enough that he draws his wand and Malfoy has his and they’re hexing each other. 

_Boys_ , Hermione thinks, and that’s when the curse hits her teeth. 

Goyle bellows. Great ugly boils are springing up across his face. She doesn’t really register that though because her mouth is on fire. She knows immediately that she has to leave. That no one can see what’s happened. 

She shoots her own hex at Potter on her way out, sending him crashing to the floor on jelly-legs and catches Malfoy’s delighted, almost apologetic glance before she’s gone. She pulls her hand down to show Professor Snape as she passes him in the corridor. 

“Hospital wing, Sir,” she says. It’s more like Hofpithal wung Shir, but he nods. 

“Dear me,” Madam Pomfrey says a few minutes later, “don’t worry dear, easily fixed. Here take this little mirror and tell me when to stop.” 

Hermione watches them retract slowly, wondering why she insisted on doing it herself. 

“How’s that now dear?”

“Almost,” she says, examining them. “A little bit more I think.” 

When she smiles at herself in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom later she thinks if he wasn’t such a horrid little shit she’d get Draco Malfoy a present. She looks almost pretty. 

“Morning, Granger,” Malfoy says a few days later at breakfast. It’s her reward for jinxing Harry Potter. Pansy chokes and even Daphne betrays surprise. 

“Morning, Malfoy,” Hermione murmurs as though it’s a very ordinary occurrence. She does not look up from _The Daily Prophet_. She’s more pleased than she lets on and decides to reward him in return. “Have you _seen_ this?” 

She levitates the paper across to Malfoy who is bemused for a moment, then deliriously pleased as he scans the article about Potter. 

“Sometimes at night I still cry about them, I’m not ashamed to admit it... I know nothing will hurt me during the tournament, because they’re watching over me,” he reads aloud gleefully and swings around to look at Harry Potter. He’s oblivious, sitting next to Neville Longbottom, who seems to be the only member of his house currently talking to him. 

Hermione meets Theo Nott’s eyes. He nods at her. Theo is always watching. He seems to find the currents of power amusing. He doesn’t need to try to be involved though. Theo is next-in-prominence to Malfoy by default. He could be first, if he wanted. Hermione sends him back a mocking little eyebrow twitch. It’s supposed to say that his respect is three years late and means nothing to her. She hopes the message is something like that, and decides to leave on a high note. 

The Triwizard Tournament is the most ridiculous thing Hermione has ever seen. Watching students fight dragons is fine, even if Potter and Krum both used the same spell with much the same result, but there’s no obvious reason why it needs to take up an entire year. Why couldn’t it be held in the weeks following exams in the summer term? One task a week, to round off the year. Hogwarts is crammed with students. She wonders how the other schools’ are getting their lessons. Are the teachers hopping back and forward to France and Eastern Europe to teach those too young to come along? How are they going to be prepared for their final exams? 

The entire thing is insane, and when the Yule Ball is announced her heart sinks. 

She had not realised she was still weak enough to care about things like that. But no one will ask her. She’ll have to hide or go home early or something. 

But then Viktor Krum approaches her in the Library and changes everything. He’s been lurking around in it for two weeks, his giggling fan club almost driving her out of her refuge, before he says something. 

Hermione has been a Slytherin for thirty-nine months when he comes up to her with a shy smile and asks to sit at her table. She can’t help smiling back. No one smiles at her. It’s like the sun coming out after thirty-nine months of winter. 

“I’ve been trying to pluck up the courage to speak to you,” he tells her. She is gobsmacked by this and tries not to show it. “I’m Viktor.”

“Hermione,” she says. “Hermione Granger.” 

“I - I was hoping,” he stumbles and she watches in amazement as he blushes, “I was hoping you would come to the Yule Ball. With me.” 

“You know I’m a Muggleborn,” she says and hates herself for saying it. 

He shrugs. “Is it important? I can teach you the dances if that’s what you are meaning.” 

“Yes,” she lies, “that would be very helpful. Would you like me to get rid of that lot?” 

She puts some mild repelling charms on their table. Hermione is very good at going unnoticed when she needs to be. She is staggered by his gratitude when the gaggle goes away and offers to show him what she did. 

Thirty-nine months as a Slytherin and she’s been too blindly focussed on magical power to realise that she is not just a Mudblood Slytherin with a powerful range of hexes. She is a girl and apparently a pretty enough girl to attract one of the most famous wizards in Europe. 

“Greengrass,” she says later, still a little dazed. They’re alone in the dorm or she’d never ask. “Do you know any good hair charms? I’ve tried Sleakeazys but I hated it.” 

The blonde girl, who gets prettier every year, looks _delighted._

“Honestly Granger, I thought you’d never ask. And you don’t need that stuff, I know somewhere much better.”

Daphne, as it turns out, does not grow more beautiful every year by accident. Her knowledge of beauty charms and potions is comprehensive. It’s hard, Hermione learns, to permanently change anything about yourself. Humans are too complex. And there are spells, which she says will do in a pinch. But there are better options. 

“You won’t read about this lot in Witch Weekly,” Greengrass explains. “You send them a sample of your hair and skin and they make them specially for you. But it’s expensive I suppose. My mother pays for it, she says it’s a woman’s most important weapon.” 

“I’ve got plenty of money,” she reassures the other girl. Hermione isn’t rich like the Pure-bloods but she’s an only child with two professional parents who’d been expecting to have to pay for her to go to Wycombe Abbey. Her allowance has been far more than she has needed so far. 

“You’re pretty anyway, I’ve always thought so. Especially now you’ve fixed your teeth. But you know,” Daphne leans in, and Hermione finds herself bending towards her, eager to learn whatever this newly intimate tone of voice is about to impart, “pretty is a skill, not something you’re given.” 

Hermione likes learning new skills so she pulls out some hairs and spells off a bit of her skin and sends an owl order to Tinctures for Titillating Witches. She thinks about power. She watches some of the older girls and she watches Pansy and she watches Daphne. She thinks about Muggle films. 

Tinctures for Titillating Witches (The More You Use Them The Better They Work!) sends her an Unruly Unguent that costs five galleons. It works in seconds and is worth every knut. Her hair is the same, but without the bushiness the waves are thick and dark and gleaming. 

There are five Elegant Enhancement potions: cream for her face, for her eyes, lashes, lips and cheeks, and one that seems to be an everywhere moisturiser. She tries them secretly and Hermione learns that Daphne is right, that it is easy to make skin glow, to fade dark circles. She doesn’t need lipstick to make her lips a little smoother, a little richer. To make her dark lashes just that little bit more lovely, even when she’s just woken up, her cheeks a little bit more pink. 

She saves everything but the creams for the ball. Any overnight changes at boarding school are too obvious. Desperate. It would attract comment. 

The ball causes a power struggle throughout Slytherin, which Hermione had been expecting but she’s still surprised when the Seventh Year prefects sit her and Malfoy down in the common room after dinner one night. 

“We need to sort this out early,” Montague tells Malfoy who nods resignedly like he knows what’s coming. Hermione does not know what’s coming so she sits quietly and waits and watches Malfoy’s eyes run up her legs, just once and then down again, like he can’t help it. He’s frowning. He twitches his eyes away. She stretches them out as gracefully as she can, like she’s seen Daphne do when she wants one of the boys to check her essay.

“Normally at a public function the two most prominent Slytherins in every year would attend together,” Persephone Selwyn tells Hermione, who blinks twice in surprise at her cordial tone. “You’ve impressed us, Granger, but you can’t go with Malfoy. That would send the wrong message.” 

“I’ve already got a date,” she says quietly, looking down at her hands as idly as she can. Inwardly, she’s very shaken. It feels like a victory even though she’s being told she’s just a dirty mudblood who can’t sully the prince. 

“From another house?” Montague asks sharply. 

“No - from Durmstrang.”

They all relax. 

“Well done Granger,” Selwyn says approvingly. “Delicately handled.” 

The two prefects rise and leave and Hermione stares after them. 

“That was weird,” she comments because Malfoy hasn’t moved. 

“Have you really got a date or were you just saying that?” 

He looks baffled, like someone has upended his world view. He’s eyeing her suspiciously but there’s something else there too. Normally he doesn’t bother to even look. It’s probably the first time he’s really seen her in weeks. She is surprised to find herself amused. _Power,_ she thinks. Oh, yes. 

“I’ve really got a date.” She gets up and his eyes track her. “You should ask Greengrass.” 

He frowns.

“Nott will kill me.” This is a piece of information she had not known and she tucks it away for future use: Theodore Nott likes Daphne Greengrass. It’s the sort of secret you don’t usually get given for free. She’s surprised that he is listening to her counsel civilly. She wonders if she’s been underplaying her hand. _The two most prominent Slytherins._ Does this mean she will be a prefect if she can keep it up? She’d known her coup was important, but she hadn’t known it would impact outside her own year group. It had been self-preservation - but now she wonders what else it could be. 

“Well, you can’t take Parkinson.” She hears the command in her own voice, and for once doesn’t modulate it. “Imagine how embarrassing that would be for you.” 

Hermione leaves him to think about this. She suspects he knows it or he’d have already asked Pansy because for whatever reason he seems to enjoy her particular brand of poison. But Parkinson would regain some status from being on Malfoy’s arm, and because she’d tried to lay claim to him so publicly if he takes another girl from her own year it will keep her down and out. 

Greengrass says yes the next morning. She looks pleased all day, feeding off Pansy’s savage mood which remains even after Zabini asks her. Blaise Zabini is handsome and rich and a Pureblood, but he’s not Sacred Twenty-Eight. 

“No one to take pity on you, M -- Granger?” she is angry enough to almost have forgotten the taboo she has sworn too. Hermione almost wishes she’d forgotten, she would have enjoyed seeing Pansy deal with the consequences. 

She is irritated when she can’t get a response from Hermione and keeps it up for days. No one knows who Hermione is going with, of course, she’s not an idiot. 

Viktor Krum is so nice Hermione doesn’t quite believe it’s real. Part of her is expecting him to turn around and pretend he’s never even met her before when she gets to the ship to get ready. She’d decided this was best: she does not want Parkinson or anyone else involved when she’s already so nervous she thinks she might actually collapse. She can’t remember even the basilisk seeming as terrifying as going overnight from the silent little Mudblood Slytherin to the date of one of the champions. She has to be perfect tonight. 

Hermione has chosen her robes with care. They are periwinkle blue and floaty with long bell sleeves. Simple, _traditional_ but beautifully cut - though a little lower than she’s used to. Nothing too showy. Nothing to look like she’s tried too hard. Nothing to look like she wasn’t born to wearing robes instead of dresses. Her skin is glowing, her dark hair is twisted up and off her face. She’s wearing the opal earrings her grandmother left her, and a gold bracelet. 

“Wow,” Viktor Krum breathes when she steps out of the girls’ loos on the Durmstrang Ship. Not the most elegant place to get ready, she thinks, but the most sensible. She smiles at him, enjoying the way his eyes rest on her lips, her collarbone, her neckline. 

She is very glad of his arm as they enter the hall. McGonagall positions them by the doors. Hermione tilts her chin up, just a little, as people stare. 

Harry Potter has brought Parvati Patil who is staring in unflattering disbelief. She meets his eyes and sees them change as he realises who she is. He gapes. She smirks. 

“Potter and Patil,” she says. “How charmingly alliterative.” 

It’s a challenge and he seems to recognise it because he closes his mouth and when his eyes drop back down they do it a little more deliberately.

“Granger,” is all he says in return. Parvati Patil doesn’t say anything. 

Daphne Greengrass is the only student to smile at Hermione. She looks beautiful, her deep blue robes setting off her magnificent colouring as she glides past with Malfoy who is gaping about as elegantly as Harry Potter. 

His expression has settled into one of very interesting calculation by the time she walks past him on her way up to the hall. Everyone is clapping and the whole thing seems more ridiculous than ever, but she can't pretend she's not enjoying it. He raises his hands a little in applause as she passes. She ignores him, and looks straight ahead, feeling that gloating would undo much of the work she’s done tonight. 

Later, when she’s sitting at high table, she has more time to examine her housemates. Theo has brought a very pretty Ravenclaw from the year above, Hermione notes with approval. A very sensible move. Pansy has managed to get a seat on the other side of Malfoy from Daphne. She’s glowering in a pink dress that’s much too frilly for someone of her height. It makes her look very young. 

She turns to Viktor. 

“So I suppose you don’t always live on a ship,” she says invitingly. 

“Well, we have a castle also, not as big as this, nor as comfortable, I am thinking. We have just four floors, and the fires are lit only for magical purposes. But we have grounds larger even than these - though in winter, we have very little daylight, so we are not enjoying them. But in summer we are flying every day, over the lakes and the mountains -”

Karkaroff interrupts but Hermione ignores him. 

“I don’t think you’ve told me where you’re from,” she encourages. 

If Viktor Krum’s conversation always returns to flying in some form or another, it’s still the most charming one she’s ever had in this hall. She tells him that the closest Muggles come to the feeling of being on a broom is skiing. He is intrigued by the idea, and even more so when he learns that she has gone all her life. 

“But Hermyown how can you say you don’t like to fly when you are sliding down great mountains on the poles, it does not make sense. I will teach you to fly and you will like it very much.”

She suspects he will be a bad teacher if he’s as good as everyone says he is. 

“I’ve never seen you fly,” she points out. “How do I know you’re really any good?” 

He stares at her, extremely taken aback. 

“Never?” he asks. 

“No,” she says. “I’d never even heard of you till you came to Hogwarts.” 

He looks delighted. 

“Hermyown, you are a very funny girl and very beautiful,” he tells her. 

She catches Potter’s eye while she’s trying to teach Viktor how to say her name properly and can’t quite conceal a glimmer of amusement. It sparkles back, and then she remembers how much she loathes him and they both look away, annoyed. 

Hermione feels graceful in Krum’s arms. They have practiced together three times a week for the past month. He’s a quiet man and very physical and much of their conversation during those times has been limited to smalltalk about classes and the tasks and the dances themselves. 

She feels confident enough to relax as he whisks her around the floor, and look up at him. 

“I’m very glad I asked you,” he says. 

“Me too,” she says shyly. The shyness isn’t feigned. She’s never been in a romantic situation with a boy whose gaze is glimmering with desire before. And Viktor isn’t just a boy: he’s almost a man, with surprisingly powerful arms and intense eyes. She likes him, she realises suddenly. 

When they have danced three times together, he goes off to find them a drink and Malfoy appears out of the shadows. 

“Who would have thought the long-molared Mudblood would turn into such a swan,” he murmurs. Her wand is in a holster on her thigh. She thinks about it and then swings around letting all the fury she’s hidden for three years show in her eyes.

“I’d stop calling me that if I were you, Malfoy.” She says his name like he’s the first to have it, like it means nothing, like it’s something disgusting she’s picked up and instantly discarded. 

He meets her eyes and looks taken aback for a moment. 

“Well _done_ , Granger,” he murmurs. “A night of triumph all around for you. Dance with me.” 

She knows he’ll never apologise. But he’s calling her Granger, and if she’s ever going to make an enemy of him it will be after careful planning - _not_ because she got emotional. She doesn’t know why it stings now. Perhaps because he hasn’t said it for a while. Perhaps because she’s having a nice time and her guard is down. 

“When Viktor gets back so he knows I’m not abandoning him,” she bargains. 

He agrees to this and somewhat to her surprise remains at her side. He’s not looking at her now though, he’s looking at Potter who is sitting next to a glowering Parvati Patil. A smirk is dancing around his mouth. 

“He's a magnificent dancer, isn't he?” she comments knowing the barb will please him. He is very easy to please. 

“He certainly thinks you look magnificent. Did you notice?” 

“Potter loathes me, I’m sure it was just a temporary glitch. Surprise at seeing me out of uniform.” 

A boy from Beauxbatons comes over and asks Parvati Patil to dance. Hermione has never seen anyone look more grateful. 

“And now Patil loathes you too,” he says happily, “because he kept staring at you at dinner and hardly said a word to her.”

“What a graceless boy.” She doesn’t know where he’s going with this so she waits. 

“Patil, Potter, Parkinson. I’m _so_ relieved there are no Ps in my illustrious name.” 

He genuinely seems to just be engaging her in some bitchy banter. 

“Perhaps I’m moving through the alphabet backwards. Nott first, then you.” 

“An orderly and yet unpredictable approach,” he approves. 

Viktor interrupts, glowering at Malfoy who looks very pleased to be seen as a threat to one of his heroes. But he’s polite, even slightly deferential, explaining that he is expected to lead Hermione out as she is the most powerful witch in his year in Slytherin. This seems to make perfect sense to Viktor. 

“I will be here, Herm-own-ninny,” he promises. 

“Herm-own-ninny,” Malfoy says a little mockingly but there’s no heat behind it. “Come on let’s dance near Potter and see who’s right about his little revelation this evening.”

Hermione finds this surprisingly appealing and follows him willingly. It’s not a million miles from where Blaise is sliding his hands too-low down Pansy’s hips either and so she gets to enjoy the furious shock on her face. 

“Taken Parkinson for a spin yet?” she inquires. 

“Not in public,” he rejoins and Hermione bursts out laughing at the innuendo. She can’t believe she’s gone from terror of this boy to manipulating him in less than a year. It almost feels friendly. 

“You wish.” 

“I’d rather take you for a spin, as it turns out.”

She looks up surprised. There’s a little warmth in his grey eyes, a little bit of intrigue. 

“I’m not going to be your teenage rebellion Mudblood fuck,” she says crudely. That is an idea she is not going to allow to fester in his head. She knows what boys like him think about girls like her, what their place is, what they’re good for. She’s heard them. She lives with them. 

His eyes widen in shock, but it’s his turn to laugh. 

“Always surprising aren’t you Granger? What about Potter? Are you going to let him touch this beautiful skin of yours?” 

She meets Potter’s eyes across the hall. They pull away immediately. So he had been staring. She’s not sure what to do with this information, so she puts it aside to consider another time. 

“If you’ve been drinking I wish you’d share,” she remarks. “Always so selfish.” 

“Of course I’ve been drinking. It’s over with Theo, you can have some later if your terrifying new paramour will release you for long enough. Or bring him, he’s a great entry ticket to the most exclusive circles. I’m not sure whose gaze is fiercer - his or Potter’s. Although the latter is very deliberately not looking here any more. What a delightful bit of ammunition you’ve given me.”

“Is this dance my reward or part of the ammunition?” she asks, amused, and glad to find he’s not really trying it on. 

“A little bit of both, perhaps. I wonder if he’ll pick a fight with you later.” 

“Why are you so obsessed with him?”

“Why do you hate him so much?” he counters, and spins her so she can’t answer. The dance ends and he returns her to Viktor, and invites them both to join the other Slytherins for a drink. 

Later, Viktor kisses her in the rose garden. The air is cold on her skin but his arms are warm. They are outside for quite some time and then they go back to dance again when the garden fills up with other couples who seem to have the same idea. 

He kisses her again, just a light touch on the lips, when they say goodnight in the entrance hall. As she turns away she sees Harry Potter on the stairs. He is scowling, but she’s not sure if it’s at her. She sends him a mocking smile, just in case. 

Persephone Selwyn materialises next to Hermione as she heads back down to the dungeons. 

“You’re smarter than I’ve given you credit for,” the older girl says. 

Hermione is pleased. The night has, she thinks, been a triumph. 

“We’re going to have a party in the common room. If you want to come, you’ll be welcome,” Selwyn says. 

“I’d need a little more proof than your word,” Hermione says. She has been invited to gatherings in Slytherin before, has made the mistake of going, grateful and glad and deceived. They have never been kind invitations. “You might be trying to punish me for getting above myself.” 

Selwyn smiles at her approvingly. 

“I won’t make a promise you’ll be safe or that no one will try anything,” she says, “but I’ll swear on my wand my invitation is genuine. You’ve proved yourself a sly, cunning little thing and we’re interested to see what you can do.” 

It’s still a risk, but Hermione takes it. She’d been watching more than just Harry Potter’s reaction when she danced with Malfoy, and she knows Slytherin had taken undelighted notice of his public approval. 

“Alright,” she agrees. 

The party is fun, and no one tries to hex her. She wakes up early with a hangover and bumps into Theo Nott showing his pretty Ravenclaw out of the common room. Still waters, she thinks. She bets Malfoy has never had to show a girl out of the common room. Zabini maybe, if he ever condescends to touch anyone. 

The year slips by, and it’s the happiest Hermione has been at Hogwarts. She doesn’t even mind being knocked out and left at the bottom of a lake. Viktor pulls blankets around her and kisses her. He tells her he’s never felt this way about anyone, that seeing her down there had been terrifying. He invites her to Bulgaria. She says yes. 

Harry Potter makes an idiot out of himself trying to be noble and as usual is rewarded for it. 

“This ridiculous competition is rigged,” she tells Viktor. He puts his arms around her, taking her irritation as a compliment to him. 

“He helped me free you,” the Bulgarian counters. “He’s a very honourable young man.” 

Hermione sneers across at Harry Potter. She doesn’t like the idea of him having seen her helpless. He is looking deeply shocked, as though he hasn’t realised yet that everything is always rigged to help him out. He meets her eyes and his expression changes. 

Viktor Krum tells Hermione he loves her three days into May. She is surprised, but not displeased and thinks she means it when she says it back. He is an odd mixture of passion and shyness and honour. He kisses her like he’s a thirsty man on his knees at a desert oasis, but he won’t do so much as put a hand up her skirt until she’s older. It’s bewildering and lovely to be treated as precious and important after almost four years in the dirt. 

She doesn’t have friends exactly, but she has enjoyable moments with Malfoy and Daphne Greengrass. She starts to feel, just a little, like she belongs. 

The third task is the most boring thing she’s ever seen and she’s very glad Malfoy has brought firewhisky with him. It’s a cold evening to sit outside. 

“Why is this happening at night?” she grumbles to Malfoy. It’s nice to have a place beside him. 

“What are you talking about Granger? I for one do not have enough yew hedges on my estate and so am _thrilled_ at the chance to stare at this one.” 

She laughs and takes the flask. 

“This entire thing has been a _debacle_.” 

He wraps a tendril of her long dark hair around his pale finger. “I don’t know, you’ve done rather well out of it,” he murmurs. “God I hope something in there finishes Potter off.” 

“No doubt it will be awarded six thousand points for Gryffindor, afterwards - annually, in remembrance.” 

He grins. 

“I do enjoy your particular brand of poison, Granger. And your taste for Seekers.”

“ _One_ Seeker. The best in the world,” she says. “You know I’ve never seen him play.”

“I suppose his hawky nose did it for you then. What’s that? Oh look. Some _sparks_. I’m so glad - really just delighted _-_ Quidditch was cancelled for this.” 

“Stop hogging the firewhisky,” Nott hisses. “For fucks sake is that Delacour out? What happened? I had fifty galleons on her.” 

“You bet on Delacour?” Daphne leans past Hermione to ask him. 

“Come on Daph, you know I’m a feminist,” he says smoothly. 

“I’ve got fifty on Krum,” Malfoy comments. He hasn’t let go of her hair yet, and adds in a lower voice, a little bit vicious, “but I’d happily lose it. As long as Potter doesn’t win. I think I’d have to leave the school.” 

“Potter isn’t going to win, he only knows about four spells,” she reassures him. “I don’t think you can disarm and summon your way through a maze. God this is so _boring_.” 

She’s being cynical to stop herself fretting, but really she wishes she could see what was happening. It’s eerie, hearing the odd snarl and scream and seeing sparks and having no idea what’s happening. After a while a body is carried out and taken to the tent. Hermione’s fingers make ragged circles in her palm. She takes another drink. More time passes. She states at the hedges, trying to make out anything. 

“Is it meant to be taking this long?” Hermione asks as casually as she can. “Oh, there’s Viktor. He looks fine.”

It _had_ been him taken to the tent. But he’s walking out now. He goes to stand by Fleur under a lantern and she watches them talk. He’s never seemed dazzled by the part-Veela. 

“How can you tell?” Greengrass asks, following her gaze. 

“Oh I mean, no I can’t. Physically unharmed but glowering as much as usual.” 

They laugh. 

“It’s a very _handsome_ glower,” she explains. 

“Dumbledore looks very twitchy,” Malfoy comments suddenly. The boy has a nose for trouble and is as perceptive as anyone she’s ever met - and he’s right. 

The mood is changing. Something’s wrong, but it’s not clear what. Potter and Diggory are both still missing. 

More time passes. She’s freezing. She wonders if she should go and talk to Viktor. But everyone’s watching and he seems okay. 

“What’s that?” she asks and then it’s suddenly clear. Harry Potter has appeared from nowhere. He’s lying on the ground, holding the Triwizard Cup, and an inert Cedric Diggory. He’s bleeding and he’s filthy. Malfoy tenses next to her. Her and Nott exchange a glance she doesn’t understand. 

“Do you think -” “Did yours say anything -” “No,” they say together. 

“Glad you’ve cleared that up,” she hisses at them, getting up to stand on the bench so she can see over the panicking heads on the benches below them. “Is Diggory alright?” 

But the word starts to carry up from where those two bodies are lying on the ground. Hermione can’t see them now: the fat little minister is there, and Dumbledore and Moody and all sorts of other people. 

“Dead?” she repeats stunned.

“Let’s get back to the dungeon,” Malfoy decides. “We’ll find out more later. This is mental.” 

He gestures at the sobbing students. Hermione nods and the four of them walk back to the dungeons. She cannot imagine what has happened. The obvious but least likely deduction is that Harry Potter killed Cedric Diggory to win. But the cup seemed to have been a portkey. So where had they been? Had it been a trap? For who - Potter? 

Of course for Potter. It’s always Potter. Something clicks and she spins suddenly, wand out. 

“Greengrass, Nott go inside,” she says. Her wand is pointing and Malfoy in the corridor. They’re just outside the Slytherin Common Room. 

“Do it,” Malfoy says to Theo. They vanish. “Granger I don’t know anything, alright.” 

“This is Voldemort isn’t it. This whole thing was a trap for that stupid boy, and now - is this why your dads caused all that fuss at the World Cup? Was it a warning?”

Hermione wasn't even there, but something about that night has given her the odd nightmare. 

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

She lowers her wand. “Fine.” 

“Are you coming?” 

“No, I’m going for a walk.” 

He gives her a strange look, and leaves her to it. 

No one tells them anything over the next few days. Dumbledore gives them a warning to leave Potter alone, and they’re all expected to go back to class. 

But Viktor tells her he thinks he was put under the imperius curse and she _just can’t shake the feeling_. The teachers are worried. More worried than they’d be if Cedric Diggory had died in an accident in the tournament. People from the Ministry are seen going in and out of Dumbledore’s office. 

Harry Potter goes to classes looking like a ghost. He doesn’t take notes. He just gazes off into the distance. 

So when she bumps into him in the courtyard one afternoon she stops and eyes him. He looks terrible.

“Was it him?” she asks, abruptly. 

“Who?” he replies vaguely. “What?”

“Did You Know Who kill Cedric?”

Everything about him seems to focus. 

Harry Potter stares at her. 

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I know it sounds crazy. But that cup was a portkey. I’m sure of it. And it’s _you_. Who got you into the tournament? Who else wants you dead that much? What happened to you in first year?”

“You don’t think I put my own name in?” he asks, apparently more stunned by this than the outrageous conclusions she’s come to. 

“Of course you didn’t, Potter,” she rolls her eyes. “I don’t think you’ve ever _chased_ fame and glory have you.” 

He sits down on a bench. He really does look terrible, but the vacancy has gone. He looks awake. 

“How did you know? No one believed me.” 

“Idiots. But _is it him_ , Potter?” 

“Yes,” he says tiredly. “He’s back. He killed Cedric - well one of his followers did.” He stands suddenly and kicks the bench. “A follower _I allowed to escape_. The little rat who betrayed my parents.” 

Hermione thinks he’s going to cry and wonders what to do. She watches him and thinks she’s never seen anyone as close to breaking. That this boy has been carrying a lot more on his shoulders than she’d ever realised. She wonders how he survived, how he got away. But she doesn’t ask. She just leaves him in the courtyard. 

Dumbledore confirms it at the end of term feast a few days later. 

Even Malfoy looks a little shocked. She wonders if his father really is a Death Eater. She wonders if his parents were planning on telling him at home. She wonders if he’s glad. 

“Is that what you meant?” he asks her later. Everyone else has gone up to finish packing, but he’d caught her eye and so she’d stayed, reading in a corner. She’s packed anyway. “In the corridor?”

“Yes,” she says flatly. “I don’t know how I knew.”

“You’re a clever little wretch. You need to pretend you’re a half-blood. We can discover some relations for you. I’ll talk to my mother. She’s already offered. Your mother had an affair, or you were adopted. It’s been done before. Most people have forgotten anyway. You don’t act like a Mudblood anymore. Selwyn will vouch for you. And some others.”

Whatever Hermione was expecting him to say, it was not this. Her mouth hangs open for a moment. 

“And if I say no?” 

The look he gives her is rather bleak. 

“I wouldn’t. You’re a Mudblood Slytherin and you’ve forgotten how to vanish.” His eyes sweep over her. “You’ll be a target. It’ll mean we can’t do this. Can’t be friends. That I can’t kiss you when you’re finally bored of Krum.”

“You’d kiss me anyway, if I let you.” The challenge is mechanical, because she’s trying to think, but he leans forward anyway and catches her lips. 

It takes her a moment but she pulls back. The hypocrisy is staggering. He’s just been gloating about the restoration of a better world order at the expense of people like her, and now he’s stealing kisses and promising her lies. 

She’s always thought he was joking when he flirted with her. And maybe he had been. But now everything has changed and it doesn’t seem funny and maybe he’s just a scared boy who doesn’t understand very much about the world. Who hates an idea, but not the reality. Or maybe he’s a manipulative little bigot who thinks she’ll kiss him and lie about her family and fight on his side. 

“Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t look it. “I just wanted to know. Think about it. We can make you safe.”

“I will,” she promises. She wishes she could say no, has the strangest urge to tell him to go fuck himself and his fake family documents. But she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to survive without it. He leaves her, sitting in the dark. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the amazing response to chapter one. I hope this also delights. Special love to SallyJAvery for checking this even though she'd had a bottle of wine.


	3. Amazingly Potter, not everything is about you

The first thing she notices on Platform Nine and ¾ the next year is that Harry Potter has grown about a foot over the summer. 

Hermione has grown too but not much. Her hair is down to her waist now. It’s dark and gleaming in the sun. Her skin is radiant and glowing from the summer. She’s just got back from a monthlong trip to Bulgaria. 

She saw some of the sights but spent most of it making the most of the lack of Trace on her wand there, reading her books while Viktor practiced Quidditch, and then encouraging him to explore her body. She wore him down after two weeks. 

She’s never been more nervous about turning up to school. She’s never looked better. She’s wearing a Muggle sundress. It’s very demure, but by Wizarding standards it’s probably a little shocking because you can see her legs and arms. 

She watches their eyes follow her as she walks as gracefully as she can to the train. She’s asked her parents not to come. She doesn’t want anyone taking note of what they look like, following them home. They were glad. The practice is busy and she’s almost sixteen - more than old enough to get herself from Lonsdale Square to King’s Cross. Old enough to fly internationally to stay with boyfriends. Old enough to have seen a dead body. 

Viktor wanted to get a portkey to meet her, but his team wouldn’t give him leave. She wishes he had and finds the urge cowardly. She doesn't need to hide behind a man. She is Hermione Granger and she’s going to have to face this all by herself. 

The second thing she notices is the big dog next to Potter. 

“What’s _that_?” Malfoy says, sliding up behind her. 

She is genuinely surprised. They’ve exchanged two letters over the summer. Hers a postcard from Tevno Lake saying that she is very grateful for his offer but not yet ready to make a decision, his reply assuring her it remains open and hoping she’s having a pleasant time in Bulgaria. 

Still, she wasn’t sure of his continued public support. 

“A very big dog,” she says. But it seems odd. 

“Mmm, well if you would call that thing a dog.” There’s something off in his tone and she gives the dog another look. It barks. 

“Give me your trunk, Granger. Merlin, you look delicious. If I’d known that’s what Muggles wore I’d be keener on them.” 

She follows him onto the train, and watches him stow her trunk next to his in the prefect carriage compartment. 

“You’ve already told people haven’t you,” she says. “You are _such a git_.” 

“Of course I have. You’ll thank me one day. Now go to the loos and get changed and put that shiny badge on.” 

She sighs, irritated, but obeys. Her big statement, it seems, has been pointless. The Malfoys have been busy making her into their version of respectable anyway. She pulls on the long black robes and sadly tucks her sundress into her little bag. When she comes out, the train is already moving. Ron Weasley is standing in the carriage doorway, blocking it. She can’t see past his shoulder but she can hear Draco’s taunting voice beyond. Typical. Parvati Patil is standing behind Weasley, glaring at his back. 

“Move, Weasley,” Hermione snaps. He looks around and glares. 

“Oh it’s you, is it?” he snarls back, but he does move. 

Hermione sits down into the seat next to Malfoy and wonders why she agreed to this. She knows why: she’s the first Muggleborn prefect Slytherin has ever had. But still it’s coming out of hiding rather more than she’s ever done before, one night off at the ball notwithstanding. 

“Granger, Malfoy,” Adrian Pucey greets them, taking a seat opposite. Pucey has never said two words to her before that weren’t desperately cruel, but now he smiles at her and asks about her summer, his eyes flicking over her. 

His Head Boy badge shines on his chest. He’s joined by Aqsa Rehan, the other Seventh Year prefect. She nods at them both and then watches as the other house representatives gather in clusters. 

It’s exciting, being a prefect. She was too nervous to be really pleased before but now she can feel a little smile tugging at her lips as she listens to the Pucey and the Head Girl outline their duties. 

“Come on,” Malfoy says, “I want to see Potter’s face.” 

This has always been their bond and she can’t pretend she’s not looking forward to seeing those surly green eyes register her new badge. She’s surprised McGonagall would choose Weasley over Potter but perhaps he’s got enough to worry about. 

She thinks about the third thing she’d noticed on the platform. Harry Potter was angry. He was tall and he was angry and he had a giant dog.

Malfoy stops to chat to their peers, gathered in a compartment not far down. He steals some of Theo’s chocolate frogs. Hermione gives cool greetings to Greengrass, who had also, miraculously, written to her over the summer, and Nott who had not. She smiles sweetly at Pansy who is gazing at her badge in horror. Ron Weasley bumps into Malfoy as he goes past. She notices Malfoy register it silently and so she isn’t surprised when he follows. He thinks he’s subtle but he isn’t really. He’d been waiting for it.

They follow Weasley down the swaying train, past compartments and loos and reuniting couples pressed together in quiet corridors before he turns into a compartment. He’s lost Patil along the way, which seems like no great loss. 

The Gryffindors’ voices carry down the train hallway and Malfoy leans back against the wall, smirking at her as he listens. She can’t believe they’re thick enough to leave the door open but they are. 

“And guess who’s a Slytherin prefect?” Weasley’s loud voice drifts out. 

“Malfoy,” Potter replies. The boy in question looks absurdly pleased at the bitter note in his rival’s tone. 

“Course. And that complete cow Hermione Granger. How she got to be a prefect when she’s… Well. Didn’t expect it that’s all.” 

Malfoy’s eyebrows shoot up, very interested now. 

“Granger is?” Potter’s tone is a little different now but she can’t identify it. “Granger is what, Ron?” 

“Well she’s just the first Muggleborn one isn’t she. First one ever I heard.”

“Yeah, weird I suppose. So her and Malfoy. Who else?” 

“That was interesting wasn’t it my little Muggleborn prefect,” Malfoy whispers maliciously. 

“Not really. So Potter doesn’t like the word Mudblood. Who does? Only odious little bigots like you.”

Malfoy does not protest this as something else catches his attention. Potter is reading something aloud to Weasley. It’s just an absurd article but at the mention of Sirius Black Malfoy’s grey eyes gleam and he steps closer. The door is almost shut, Hermione sees, but not properly. Malfoy slides it open with a flourish and leans against the doorway. She slides in next to him, aware that she is being _ridiculous,_ but knowing the role she’s signed up for by coming with him anyway _._

“Manners, Potter, or I’ll have to give you a detention,” he drawls. “You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.”

“Yeah,” Potter mutters, “but you, unlike me, are a git, so get out and leave us alone.”

The Weasleys and the blonde girl laugh. Hermione’s lip twitches in spite of herself. Potter catches it and sits up a little straighter. 

“Tell me, how does it feel being second-best to Weasley, Potter?” Malfoy asks, lip curled.

“Shut up, Malfoy,” the Weasley girl snaps.

“Very brave aren’t you?” Hermione steps in. “Now, which Weasley is this? Fred or George?”

It’s not the cleverest putdown she’s ever come up with, but it works. The girl’s brown eyes flash furiously and she’s about to speak when Malfoy speaks again. He’s smirking, but he and Potter are glaring at each other, and there’s no mistaking the hatred in both their eyes. 

“I seem to have touched a nerve,” Malfoy says. “Well, just watch yourself, Potter, because I’ll be _dogging_ your footsteps in case you step out of line.”

Hermione follows him out of the carriage, wishing she hadn’t gone. All she’s done is let Potter know she finds him funny sometimes, and enabled Malfoy’s bad dog threat or joke or whatever. 

“That was pathetic,” she tells Malfoy. “I’m honestly ashamed of you.” 

“Not my best,” he admits. “But he really was rattled by that dog comment.” 

“What is it do you think? Or, I suppose, _who_?” 

“My father thinks it’s Sirius Black,” he says as though this were not a perfectly insane thing to say. 

“The Sirius Black who failed to kill Potter and almost ruined our third year?” 

“Apparently so.”

“What a strange way to make friends,” she remarks. 

Hermione is an avid reader of _The Daily Prophet_ and it’s easy to see in the start of that year that its propaganda has wrought a considerable amount of damage. The Ministry has sent its spy into the mix and no one seems to mind. Students shy away from Harry Potter and send him fearful looks. There is muttering about Dumbledore being insane. She thinks it’s a stupid tactic and ignores it. At some point Lord Voldemort will do something they can’t deny and they’ll look ridiculous. Short-termist politics always irritates Hermione. 

But she has her own concerns. Somehow the Malfoys have made a specific and secret part of Slytherin accept her. One girl in the year above even goes so far as to express admiration for her managing to overcome her upbringing. 

“I had a perfectly lovely upbringing with my perfectly lovely Muggle parents,” she snaps back. 

She just can’t work out what’s in it for them. Malfoy had presented no conditions with his offer, a highly suspicious event in itself, and to make matters more perplexing his parents have willingly become involved. 

Hermione gets her first ever detention in her first lesson with Professor Umbridge. The woman had annoyed her in the Great Hall at the feast, but that is nothing to the fury her class provokes. She pushes back, demanding to be taught properly. The others look at her, amazed, at this uncharacteristic verbosity in class. They’ve never really seen her lose her temper before. 

But Hermione is scared and she wants to learn to defend herself and this woman is withholding that. 

“I had thought better of this house,” the woman says in a sickly sweet voice, “but I suppose blood will out. Detention, Granger.” 

When she arrives at the woman’s office to serve it, Harry Potter is leaving. That’s no surprise. Everyone has heard about _his_ outburst, even the smallest and most insignificant students. He is holding his hand and staring down at it and he almost walks into her. He looks up, startled. 

“Come to gloat?” he snaps. 

“Amazingly Potter, not everything is about you.” 

She notices two things: he looks surprisingly panicked for a boy who’s just been writing lines, and he really has grown. She despises herself for the latter. 

“Granger,” he says. His eyes are blazing and he’s almost painfully sincere, “she’s. I don’t know what she is. Look just try to use your own quill, alright?” He’s still covering his hand. He’s about as subtle as his gamekeeper pal trying to hide an illegal creature.

“What do you mean? Oh, show me that.” 

She grabs his hand and tries to ignore the strange, jarring urge to look back up into those green eyes. 

“Potter,” she breathes, horrified. Etched into the back of his hand are the words: _I must not tell lies_. They look red and sore. “I’m pretty sure this is blood magic, which makes it illegal - you should threaten to report this.” 

“I get the sense that wouldn’t help.” He pulls his hand back. 

This silences Hermione. It’s what she should have seen too, she think _s._

“Look. Get some Essence of Dittany if you can. Soak it in solution of strained and pickled Murtlap tentacles, if you can’t. And don’t get more detentions - it’s only going to get more painful.” 

“Thanks. What did you do?” he asks, plainly curious. 

“Oh you know,” she replies lightly. “‘Blood will out’.” 

Potter stares down at her for a moment. He’s frowning and so intense she can hardly think. Then the door starts to open and he turns on his heel and vanishes. 

The Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher isn’t stupid enough to use her Punishment Quill on a Slytherin Prefect, but she makes Hermione write _I must not try to correct my betters_ out a hundred and fifty times. It’s past midnight when she leaves.

Umbridge gets worse. She assigns them reading and vanishes to oversee the lessons of more capable teachers. Hermione, who has read everything already, who has spent the summer persuading Viktor Krum to teach her everything he knows from the Durmstrang curriculum, has a sudden thought. 

Hogwarts, Viktor had said, must be a very good school because Harry Potter - a fourth year at the time - knew plenty of spells he didn’t. 

Potter has escaped Voldemort at least twice and - she suspects - probably three times. Potter, rangy, newly tall, moody Potter who she has always dismissed as spoilt, can cast a full Patronus. 

She pushes the thought aside and goes to Snape. Everyone has always said he wants the DADA job. He’s never shown her any special favouritism, but he is her Head of House and he has chosen her to be his prefect. 

“I am an extremely busy man, Miss Granger,” he tells her in his low, sarcastic voice. “I can point you to certain books. Perhaps I can occasionally feign some sort of extra potions lesson for you if there is anything particularly complicated you need to practice. But I cannot take over your lessons.” 

It’s not enough. Hermione is a Mudblood Slytherin and Lord Voldemort is back and she can’t rely on Malfoy’s dubious protection forever. She feels helpless and so she writes to Remus Lupin. Malfoy has warned her that the Ministry is checking students’ post, so she uses his owl, doubting anyone will dare read _that_. Her letter is careful nonetheless: 

_Dear Professor Lupin,_

_I recently found a book of yours in my belongings that I never returned. I feel terrible about this, and would be glad to return it._

_I have a Hogsmeade weekend coming up. Perhaps we could meet?_

_Cruelty isn’t strength,_

_Hermione Granger_

Remus Lupin meets her at the Shrieking Shack. He looks terrible. He has more grey hairs and even shabbier robes. He tells her not to call him Professor Lupin. She must call him Remus. She says she’ll pay him for private tutoring on Hogsmeade weekends and in the holidays. He tells her she doesn’t have to pay him. She says she’s not a charity case, thank you very much. It works just like she thought it would. Her parents are only too pleased to send funds to further Hermione’s education and offer to check his teeth for free if he comes to see them in their practice in Islington. 

“You won’t be able to do magic in the holidays,” he protests. 

“I can watch what you’re doing though and practice the wand movements with a stick. You can still explain stuff. Or we can find somewhere with enough magic going on that no one will notice me casting.”

He smiles then for the first time. 

“You have been learning,” he acknowledges. He looks like he’s proud of her, and it makes her heart sing. “Shall we start now?” 

In just one afternoon, they cover most of the OWL level spells. He asks her why she thinks she needs him as she can already do so much of it. She tells him she can do the spells, she can do almost any spell, just from reading a book. But she can’t learn to duel. She can’t defend herself. She’s never been in a fight. She tells him something she wouldn’t admit to anyone else.

She is _scared_. 

Hermione keeps her head down and her mouth shut around Umbridge after that. She watches and she waits. Her secret fills her with pleasure. Let the others work out their own arrangements. No one has ever lifted a finger for Hermione Granger, except Remus Lupin. 

Clearly someone has worked out their own arrangements, because yet another of Umbridge’s absurd and dangerous “Educational” decrees is pinned up the following day. Hermione rolls her eyes, wondering who’d be stupid enough to get caught. 

Hermione hassles, bargains, and irritates Snape into getting him to teach her twice a week, most weeks. She can tell he enjoys it. Then every Hogsmeade weekend, she spends hours learning and practicing with Lupin in the Shrieking Shack. In their own ways they are both extraordinary teachers. Lupin is more patient and more willing to go beyond her curriculum into adult spells. Snape is more imaginative, more exacting and more willing to play dirty. 

“Again, Miss Granger,” he hisses until she manages to get past his shields. 

“Coming to the match, Granger?” Malfoy asks her on patrol one evening. He’s been absolutely ridiculous lately and she looks at him, unwillingly. 

“What have you done now?” she sighs. 

“Weasley’s playing for the first time,” he says gleefully. “I’ve written him a song.”

“How romantic.” 

“I’ve taught all the other Slytherins but you’ve been too _busy_ haven’t you. Always off being a little swot. Come on it’ll be fun.”

“Potter might even be distracted enough to let you get the snitch,” she snaps nastily. She knows him, knows why he’s so rabid for Potter, knows it absolutely kills him that the Gryffindor always gets the snitch. 

His good humour vanishes, and he takes out his fit of temper on a First Year. 

“Stop that. Come on.” She drags him into an empty classroom. “Don’t take it out on small children who can’t fight back.”

“I’m fine Granger, just didn’t realise you’d replaced all those Bulgaria jerseys with red and gold.” 

She rolls her eyes. She did _not_ parade around in Viktor’s jerseys. 

“I was just winding you up, you stupid git. You’ve been too smug lately.”

His mood changes immediately, and he steps closer. 

“Not around to keep me in check with that poisonous little tongue of yours,” he murmurs. “Pansy’s been getting ideas you know.” 

“I hope she tries something, I need to practice my DADA.”

His mouth quivers. 

“Not those sort of ideas.” 

Hermione had known it would come to this eventually. Pansy’s been after him for years, and she’s pretty enough and funny enough to tempt him. But Draco Malfoy’s favour carries weight in Slytherin. And Draco Malfoy is a teenage boy who really could do with something to distract him from embarrassing himself trying to one-up Harry Potter. 

“What are you waiting for, then? My permission?” 

He nods. Hermione’s mouth droops open. He’s very close now, and his finger brushes down her face and closes it, running along her lips for a moment afterwards. 

“I could do it anyway, but it would be a challenge to you. And I’m not interested in that right now. Not after all the work I’ve done.”

“I wonder what you’ll do when it suits you to drop me,” she muses. She wonders if he’s going to try to kiss her again and, if he does, whether she’ll let him. It’s tempting, just to take him away from Pansy. But really Pansy isn’t worth it. 

“Fine, you can fuck Pansy if you really want to lower yourself that far. I can’t say it’s of any interest to me. Just make sure she and everyone else know I allowed it.” 

He smirks and steps back. 

“Well, alright then.” 

The next day Malfoy’s song rings through the Quidditch stands, Ron Weasley plays the worst game of Quidditch she’s ever seen, and Harry Potter gets himself banned from Quidditch for life. 

She can’t understand why he lets Malfoy get to him. Malfoy is good at picking up where people are weak, truly gifted at it really, but after more than four years of it you’d think Potter would have learned to protect himself a little better. 

He comes back to the dungeon and kisses Pansy in front of the fire. She treats him like he won the match, and he treats Potter getting banned like a win and she supposes in their own way they’re a disastrously well-matched pairing. She can certainly see the appeal for such a spoilt boy. 

She sits alone, and writes to Viktor. She tells him how Harry Potter (who even she knows is easily the best flier at Hogwarts) has got himself banned from Quidditch. Why are boys so stupid? she asks. She tells him she misses him, and will he send her a jersey with his name on it? She tells him a thousand other little details. She tells him about Umbridge, without criticising her openly, he knows her well enough to read between the lines, and she tells him how the weather is getting cold and how beautiful Scotland is in winter so long as you stay inside and don’t mind the lack of daylight. 

“Who’s the novel for?” Nott asks, sitting across from her. “And is this what we have to put up with now? Couldn’t you stop it?” 

“I said it was fine, and Viktor.”

“You’re still seeing Krum?” he asks, impressed.

She gives a little catlike smile. 

“Well that is quite dashing of you, Granger, I have to say. Have you been to his matches?” 

“Yes in the summer, in Bulgaria.” 

His eyebrows go up again. 

“You know,” he comments mildly, “if you married someone like Krum - someone foreign - it would open a lot of doors for you.” 

“I’m not going to marry him,” she says, horrified. “I’m sixteen!”

“Well you remain a conundrum for us all then. I had thought…” he looks at Malfoy again, disgusted. She remembers fourteen-year-old Theo Nott showing a very pretty fifteen-year-old girl out of the dorms, and thinks Malfoy probably should have asked his advice before setting off on what appears to be his first romantic adventure. 

“Well, I thought he and Potter were going to live happily ever after,” she counters. “And no, that’s not - that’s not a good idea.” 

“No,” Theo muses. “It certainly isn’t, but after his family decided to make you half respectable I had thought he must be planning something like that. Especially since you told him you wouldn’t be his - what was it - he was absolutely stunned. Mudblood fuck in the dark or something right?” 

Hermione’s lips quirk up. Parkinson is straddling Malfoy now. Adrian Pucey catches her eye and tilts his head. He even goes so far as to raise an eyebrow. 

“I did say that. Urgh, Pucey wants me to go and stop them.”

“Well if you make him do it, it’ll make you look weak,” Theo tells her. 

“I know, I know. Fine. I thought we were getting dinner _and_ a show.”

He chokes. She stands up, letter in hand. She’ll take it to the owlery now. She passes a little nearer the couple than she needs to. 

“Parkinson,” she says in a low but clear voice. Pansy freezes and pulls back. “Take it somewhere more discreet. You’ve made your point.” The girl’s shoulders relax and she scrambles off Malfoy’s lap. 

Malfoy is looking rather dazed, but he takes Pansy’s hand and pulls her towards the dorms. 

Hermione goes to post her letter. She passes Cho Chang, who is crying as usual, on the seventh floor and then about a minute later Harry Potter whose expression is so similar to Malfoy’s it pulls her up short. 

_That_ pairing had escaped her. But then she’s been very deliberately not watching Harry Potter this year. It had escaped Malfoy too - or perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps this is why he finally decided to take Parkinson up on her offers. 

Potter doesn’t seem to have noticed her. He looks less dazed and more confused. She steps back into the shadows as he passes. She wonders where they were coming from. Lupin has filled her in on all the secret passageways she hadn’t found herself, but so far as she knows this is just a corridor. Curious. 

“Pushing it very close to curfew, Potter,” she sneers, stepping out. 

He flushes. He was definitely snogging Chang. He’s so _innocent_. 

“I - it’s not that close,” he mutters. She’s disappointed. Usually he comes up with better comebacks than that. “You know they’re reading the owl post.” 

He’s looking at her letter. It’s very clearly addressed to Viktor. She can feel a slight flush on her own cheeks and hates herself for it. She’s disarmed by his warning.

“Well, fortunately I have nothing to hide.” 

“Somehow I very much doubt that,” he murmurs. There’s an intensity in his green eyes that is altogether disquieting. “You’re a Muggleborn, but you’re a Slytherin. That can’t be easy. What’s your game, Granger? You know the truth but you sit next to Malfoy and laugh while he makes jokes calling me mental and Dumbledore senile. What side are you on?” 

This is extremely dangerous territory and she’s glad he’s pushed it. She’s regretted the interchange outside Umbridge’s office all term and now she has a chance to put it right. 

“I’m on my own side, just like I have always been.” 

“We could help you, you know. We could make sure you were safe.”

“No one has ever bothered to make sure I was safe, except for me. I don’t need _your_ help, Potter. Besides, people around you do seem to just turn up dead don’t they?” 

She’s wielded the words like a dagger, and shoved it right into his weak spot. Into his stupid, noble little heart. But it’s deeply unsatisfying. She expected, relied on the pain and fury on his face and yet somehow it leaves her feeling a little bit emptier. She turns and leaves him frowning in the corridor. If Malfoy had said that Potter would have punched him. But he lets her go without a word. 

He’s gone the next day along with the Weasleys and she hears rumours of a violent attack. She regrets the timing but supposes the message will sink in even more now. She goes home for the holidays and meets Professor Lupin three times a week on Highbury Fields to practise DADA. He walks there, and tells her he lives nearby. She wonders how many other magical people are hiding in Islington. Hermione uses a wooden stick instead of a wand, and thinks that somehow he manages to teach her more than almost anyone else even though she’s not actually doing the magic. She wonders if Professor Snape will duel her yet. He’s been allowing her to run through specific interchanges, but she wants to know what it’s like when he’s fighting back, when her adrenaline is running, when she’s scared. 

After Christmas, Professor Snape changes the timing of her extra lessons. He tells her he’s giving Potter remedial Potions lessons. She doesn’t believe him, and she doesn’t think he expects her to. But she’s annoyed anyway at having to change her schedule around for Harry Potter. She is annoyed she has to wait to show him everything she’s learned over the holiday. She managed to fit in nine two-hour lessons with Remus Lupin. She wonders what the other students are doing to prepare. She thinks about OWLs and feels a bit sick, but she has gone through her schedule three times and she knows she is already studying in every spare moment. 

Parkinson, who had evidently been invited to spend New Year with the Malfoys, returns to Hogwarts unbearably smug and wearing a pair of emerald earrings every day. She sits fiddling with the earrings and gossiping with Tracey about the upcoming Hogsmeade Valentine’s Day weekend. Her message is very clear. Malfoy looks a little surly. 

“God forbid you give her anything that wasn’t green,” Hermione hisses at Malfoy as they leave to do their prefect rounds. 

“It’s to match her green silk -” 

“Thank you Malfoy, I already know what Parkinson's underwear looks like.” 

He trips and almost falls out of the common room. 

“Careful,” she says snidely. 

“Are you telling me -” he demands. 

“I’m not telling you anything about what happens in the girls’ dorms, but I will tell you I wouldn’t touch Pansy Parkinson with a barge pole.” 

“Oh, I always forget you all live together as well,” he says, disappointedly and very stupidly. 

“Yes, anything that doesn’t directly involve you must be a complete mystery,” she agrees. She wonders if she can wind him up enough to pull a wand on her. 

“What did Krum get you?” he asks, apparently unbothered by this jibe. 

“You’re a wonderful girlfriend, you know that Malfoy,” she says sweetly. “I’ve been just _dying_ to talk about it actually. He came to visit for three days - it’s the offseason you know. Well of course you do. Anyway we stayed in that hotel off Diagon Alley for New Year - The Morganna -” 

“I am _not_ a wonderful girlfriend and yes of course I know it, we went to the opening.” 

“It’s nice isn’t it? Of course, there isn’t really anything in Magical London to touch some of the Muggle hotels but you lot wouldn’t know about that sort of thing. Honestly. It’s like going back in time.” 

Naturally this does get a rise out of him, but he still doesn’t get really angry, just irritated _._ Potter didn’t get angry either. Hermione wonders if she’s losing her touch. 

“You think _muggles_ have better hotels?” he snarls.

“Oh yes, they have lots of things that are much better,” she says encouragingly. “I was shocked the first time I went to Diagon Alley. Would it kill someone to open a decent restaurant? I mean - where are you going to take Parkinson on Valentine’s Day? Madam Puddifoots, the Three Broomsticks or The Hogs Head?” 

“What’s wrong with Madam Puddifoots? My mother likes it there.” 

Hermione bursts out laughing. 

“One day I’ll take you into Muggle London or something and you’ll see what I mean,” she promises. “We’ll go to Quaglino’s.” 

“Like a date?”

“No, like an anthropology trip.”

“You’re in a very weird mood, Granger.” 

She _is_ in a weird mood. She thinks it might be a combination of fear and fury, but she’s been compartmentalising it all for so long she can’t really tell anymore. She thinks that’s dangerous. She wishes she’d been able to see Snape that night. She always feels calmer after practising with him. 

Two days later she reads about a mass breakout of Death Eaters in _The Daily Prophet_. It takes a few days for the news to trickle around the school: few other students take the paper every day. The mood changes. 

Fear and fury, she thinks, is about right. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK fifth year was meant to be one chapter but it was 13k by the end so I have broken it up. Thank you as always to SallyJAvery for her general home improvements on this and lifelong friendship, and also to you for reading, enjoying and (hopefully) commenting and kudosing.


	4. Merlin, Potter. No need to threaten me with a good time.

Two days after that there is a new decree banning teachers from giving students any information not directly related to their subject. Hermione is furious. She goes straight down to the dungeon. 

“Miss Granger, you must surely be aware that you could have passed the OWL and probably the NEWT already,” he says, a little irritable to have his marking interrupted. He scrawls a large P in green ink on the top essay. She hopes she hasn’t annoyed him into the grade. 

“I’m not… I’m not  _ just  _ worried about my exams,” she admits, staring down at the parchment. “With who I am… I might need…” 

“Go away, Granger. I will not be cancelling your extra Potions lessons and you are already taking up far too much of my time.” 

She flees, grateful, ashamed by the softness in his voice. Pity, she thinks, and hopes it’s not. 

Viktor sends her an  _ entishiya _ bracelet for Valentine’s Day. It’s silver and gold filigree and it’s very pretty and the other girls admire it and she wonders why she’s not more thrilled. She wears it and his jersey to Hogsmeade though. She feels like his name on her back is a talisman, warding off the difficult choice she knows she’s going to have to make. 

Malfoy eyes it and for once doesn’t say anything, but he’s frowning when he and Parkinson peel off hand-in-hand. Hermione slips off to the Shrieking Shack for her lesson with Remus. She’s so glad to see him she almost gives him a hug. 

“I brought you this,” she says, handing him a hot chocolate from Honeydukes. She’s learned he has a weakness for chocolate, and now she always brings something for them to share. Honeydukes is expensive. It’s freezing in the shack, so before they start she sets her bluebell flames to work in the old fireplace. They’re smokeless, the clever things. She invented them. 

“I’m ready to try duelling,” she tells Remus. “Can we do it here?” 

“It’s small, but it’s possible. Stay here while I put some extra wards up.” 

Afterwards, he heals her cuts and goes through all her mistakes, and she thinks she’s never felt better. 

When she walks back through Hogsmeade she sees Harry Potter leaving Madam Puddifoots in pursuit of a weeping Cho Chang, and saunters aggressively into them. 

“Watch where you’re going Potter,” she snaps. “My word, Chang, I thought  _ you  _ had taste. Bit of a step down from Diggory isn’t it?” 

Cho Chang bursts into renewed tears and storms off. 

“That was uncalled for, Granger,” Harry Potter flings back. His green eyes are blazing. “Don’t bring Cho into whatever this is.” 

“You’re right,” she says. “But honestly, she’s always  _ crying  _ . She shouldn’t be on a date with you if she’s just going to run off crying. Pathetic.”

He sighs and lowers his wand and she almost regrets it. She bets Potter would be fun to duel. He’s always so angry and righteous. 

“I know,” he says glumly. “She does cry an awful lot. It was fine and then,” he gestures after the beautiful Ravenclaw. “I don’t know. Anyway I’ve got to meet Luna. Just - leave Cho alone, alright?”

“You’re meeting  _ Lovegood  _ ? On Valentine’s Day?” 

“Yeah but it’s not - she was meant to come!”

“Did you tell Cho Chang you were meeting another girl half-way through your date?” she demands. She doesn’t know if she’s more annoyed or entertained. 

“Um, yeah I -” 

“Potter you really are a complete simpleton, aren’t you.” Hermione shakes her head in disbelief. “If you like Chang, run after her and tell her you’ve told me off good and proper and aren’t I such a horrid bitch and you’re really sorry about whatever this Lovegood thing is and you hope you can get it over with quickly but won’t she please come and maybe you can take a detour to the greenhouses on your way back to the castle.” 

“The greenhouses?” he looks stunned. She enjoys it. 

“For snogging, Potter. Do keep up.” 

“Right. Yeah. I suppose I’d -” 

He walks off blindly, and she’s left staring after him wondering if she’s going completely insane. 

Three days later an interview appears in  _ The Quibbler  _ and sets the entire school and probably the entire country on its head. Hermione reads it, fascinated, and a little awed. Harry Potter somehow manages to come across as both humble and extremely noble. Umbridge is stupid enough to ban it. 

Malfoy is angrier than she’s ever seen him. She finds him in a classroom, half the desks in pieces. She repairs them and doesn’t say anything. He sticks to her like a limpet for days afterwards, partnering with her in every class and sitting with her at meals, as though she is enough to ward off the mutterings about his father being named in the article. 

She wonders if she is, if that’s what she has been elevated for. She’s never asked him about his family but it’s an open secret in Slytherin. 

She bumps into Potter when they’re both alone a couple of weeks later. He’s coming out of Snape’s classroom and she’s going in. 

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” she says. 

“What are you talking about now?” he asks. He looks miserable.

“Making yourself even more of a target! Why did you go public?” 

“People needed to know,” he says stubbornly. “The Ministry’s lying to them, they need to be able to prepare -”

“What is it you think these people are going to do?” she asks in frustration. “How are they going to prepare? They’re just going to stand back and get out of the way until it’s all over like they did last time.” 

“Not everyone, Granger. People are braver than you give them credit for. And you know, I think if I was married to a Muggleborn, I’d want a bit of notice wouldn’t you? Even if it does just mean being able to get out of the way.” 

This is an absolute leveller and she stares after him, wondering how he can still be so recklessly brave and noble after everything he’s faced. 

Malfoy peels off and she should have been suspicious but she’s not and later she kicks herself for it and thinks she should have known. She assumes he’s just tired of shielding himself behind a Muggleborn. She should have known he’d be out for blood. 

He and Pansy tumble into the common room one night, crowing about catching Harry Potter and a room full of Gryffindors in some secret defence society. Her first reaction is that she’s impressed they’ve got away with it this long, given their entire lack of subtlety. 

“Well, Granger?” Malfoy asks, flopping down beside her. 

“Yes, very clever Malfoy,” she says automatically. “I’m sure your mother will be very proud.” 

Theo Nott snorts. Draco Malfoy frowns. 

“I thought you’d be pleased.” 

“I don’t care about Harry Potter and his stupid friends, I’m trying to finish my essay,” she lies. Inwardly, she is thinking frantically. If Harry Potter is expelled from school, does that really matter? Surely it will make the school safer. But Harry Potter is important enough to Voldemort to warrant multiple attempts on his life. Why? She doesn’t know. But she suspects that if he’s sent away with a broken wand it will be the worst for all of them. 

She wonders when she started believing  _ in  _ him, and not just believing him. 

The next morning it gets much worse. Instead of Harry Potter going, it’s Dumbledore. Hermione has no particular affection for the Headmaster, who never as far as she knows bothered to make sure the Muggleborn wasn’t being tortured in Slytherin, which she was. But then he doesn’t seem to have ever stepped in to make sure his favourite Harry Potter was particularly happy either so she’s always assumed he had a different view of student welfare than, for example, Remus Lupin. 

Still, if the story going around the school is true he really is impressive. 

“He got past two Aurors, Umbridge, and the Minister for Magic!” 

“I heard it was three Aurors.”

By lunchtime, it’s five. Malfoy is so angry he can’t even look at Potter but he’s also delighted that Dumbledore is gone. 

Hermione goes to Snape’s office. 

“I am having impure thoughts,” she announces. He looks up from his marking in abject horror. “About Harry Potter,” she continues, very pleased with the effect of this statement. She’s feeling wild and reckless and like she’s going to blow up the dungeon if she doesn’t do something. 

“Miss Granger, get out of my office.”

“Very impure,” she continues, “even - some might say - politically disadvantageous.” 

This gets his attention. 

“I truly miss the days when you were quiet, do you know that? Sit down.” 

He murmurs a spell she doesn’t know and the air fills with some sort of static noise. 

“What was that?” she inquires, interested. 

“Muffliato. This is clearly going to be an extremely dangerous conversation. If you absolutely must unburden yourself, I suggest you do it swiftly and leave me in peace.” 

“I need a way to compartmentalise my mind, professor, and I’m pretty sure you can help.” 

“What makes you think I have any need for compartmentalisation?” 

“Because I don’t think you’re teaching Harry Potter remedial Potions and haven’t, in fact, ever believed that. I don’t know what you are teaching him, and I’m sure it’s deeply unpleasant for you, but you’re doing it anyway.”

Snape looks at her for a long moment, somehow managing to make his expression both entirely impassive and utterly exasperated. “You are entirely too clever for your own good, Granger, and I’m amazed you haven’t suffered the consequences of it yet. I expect you will and it will be dreadful and no more than you deserve.” 

“Thank you, Sir,” she says politely. “Here is the problem: I think Dolores Umbridge is extremely dangerous to this school, probably to the entire country. I think Harry Potter is an  _ idiot  _ but he is also right, and I think Albus Dumbledore is very necessary to maintain the safety of this school. I think I am a Muggleborn in Slytherin and at this particularly precarious point in time I don’t want to show any of my horrible peers that I don’t thoroughly agree with them, but it is getting harder and harder not to.” 

“You are playing a very dangerous balancing act,” he says. 

“Aren’t we all,” she smiles sweetly at him. He frowns at her but she’s not really scared of Snape. She knows he’s fond of her in his own way, suspects he even sees something of himself in her. 

He writes her a note. 

“You will need to go to Diagon Alley during the holidays and buy this book. I wouldn’t suggest ordering it by Owl post at present.” Those black eyes flash a warning. “Read it, absorb it, practice it. This is not something you can learn just by reading. However, I have every faith in you making as much progress alone with a book as some other students might make with dedicated personal teaching in a decade.” 

“Do you not have a copy, Sir?” 

“Get out, Granger.” 

“Yes, Sir.” 

She takes the note and secretes it away in one of the hidden pockets of her bag.  _ I have every faith in you  _ . She glows a little, despite all the fear she’s fighting, and it helps her stay impassive when Pansy Parkinson deducts points from her, parading her new badge around like it’s a medal. 

Pansy uses her new powers to try to revenge herself on Hermione with real relish. The rest of the castle is absorbed in the pandemonium that welcomes Umbridge’s first day as Headmistress. Fireworks burn and spread across the castle and everyone knows the Weasley twins are behind them. It creates a reckless mood. But Parkinson remains undeterred, or perhaps she is inspired by the chaos. 

“Your hair’s a mess, Granger,” she says at breakfast. “That’ll be five points.” 

“Parkinson I truly don’t care if you take five points or fifty points or five hundreds points off me,” Hermione replies, “though that’s certainly more than you’ve ever earned for Slytherin.” 

It’s not enough. She’s been mired in jealousy and dislike for too long. She keeps it up all day and eventually she gets brave enough to do it away from all the teachers. She does it in the Slytherin Common Room, just after dinner. It’s an ordinary night despite the dramatic day: the room is full of people doing their homework and playing games. Hermione wonders why Parkinson would risk such public disgrace. 

“What did you say to me?” Hermione asks softly, head tilted. 

She’s known this is coming, known it for years. She scans the room with a quick flick of her eyes. They’re hungry, avidly interested. They’ve all known it was coming too, and no one there will be sorry to see her lose. 

“I said, that’ll be five points because you don’t belong here, Granger.”

“Levicorpus!” she says inside her head, as she stands up. It takes more power than she’d expected but there is a very satisfying flash of light and Pansy Parkinson rises in the air and flips upside-down, her robes falling over her chest and baring her famous green silk knickers to the whole room. 

Remus Lupin had taught her this spell. He’d done it a little reluctantly and told her only to use it in an emergency. She asked him. She’d never forgotten the report of the Death Eaters at the World Cup, but she’d never found the right spell in any books. She’d had nightmares after reading about that. Nightmares of being hung upside-down with her knickers out, helpless and humiliated. She thinks Remus is too kind really to have ever used it for its real purpose. It wouldn’t work so well on someone in trousers - though no one likes being flipped upside down and hung in the air - but for wizards and witches in robes, well. It’s  _ exquisitely  _ crafted for them. 

She has selected it specifically. It won’t hurt Pansy. But it will humiliate her, just like her kind humiliates Muggles, humiliates Hermione in her nightmares. 

Parkinson fires something back. It’s easily dodged. She was slow, trying to hold her robes over her immodesty. 

“Come on Parkinson, you can do better than that,” Hermione says encouragingly. 

“CRUCIO,” Pansy screams and this spell is not easily dodged. Hermione wasn’t expecting the escalation and it rattles through her shield like it’s nothing. 

Hermione has never felt anything like it. She’d thought she had been in pain before. She knows now she hasn’t. It ends quickly. Pansy might mean it, but she’s not that strong. 

Hermione forces herself up from the floor. Everything in her aches but if this moment goes wrong she might as well just leave the school. There are shocked faces around the room but she doesn’t give herself time to dwell on them. 

“Obscuro,” she commands. She’s still panting and her voice is hoarse from screaming. But she needs to get the upper hand before Pansy has the strength to send her another dose. Pansy starts to shriek, her vision gone. Her next spell -  _ Crucio _ again, the stupid, reckless girl - goes wide. “Avis,  _ oppugno _ .” 

The flock of birds descends on Parkinson. She can’t see what they are, can’t see where they’re coming from. She twists in the air as they peck at her. She tries to shield but they’re inside it with her, relentless. Her face is becoming mottled from being upside-down and she’s gasping for breath. Hermione just stands, watching as she screams. The black-haired girl goes redder and redder. 

“Let her down, Granger,” Millicent pleads from a sofa. No one else has stepped in to help either of them. That’s the way it works in Slytherin. They’ll respect the outcome, but they won’t interfere. 

“No.”

The rest of their housemates have moved back, out of the way, but a chair is on fire and another lies split open. Pansy’s not pulling any punches. She just can’t see and she doesn’t know enough magic to remove the blindfold. 

Hermione is casting silently now. Bluebell flames lick their way over Pansy’s robes and catch in her hair. They won’t burn her, not much, but she lets them singe her hair. She’s using simple spells, nothing harmful. Parkinson has pulled out the second-worse spell she knows, but Hermione is going to beat her with simple stuff. The demonstration is more powerful that way. 

The message is this: they can come for her as strongly armed as they like but they have  _ no idea  _ what she’s capable of. 

Another silent curse and Pansy’s body is stinging all over like she’s swum into the arms of a Portuguese Man of War. She screams again. It’s raw and savage and desperate. Another command and another and Hermione turns her the right way up. She levitates her until she is pressed up against the wall, still blindfolded. She’s still sending out spells but they’re going wide. 

The birds are still flocking at her, dive-bombing her with their little claws, pecking her. They’ve ripped into her robe in places and Pansy’s porcelain skin is scratched and red and bleeding, and her face still flushed beetroot. Hermione dismisses them with a wave and they vanish with little pops. 

She summons Parkinson’s wand, and uses that to cuff her hands and legs. It’s the absolute height of humiliation to be cursed with your own wand. She tosses it on the floor. It clatters on the stone and rolls until it’s lying a few feet below where Pansy’s shoes dangle uselessly in the air.

“Leave her there for an hour,” she says. She’s speaking to the room, but she’s looking at Malfoy. He looks supremely uncomfortable. “And then you can take her down.” 

She turns and walks out of the Common Room. She can hear Parkinson begging and moaning over her shoulder. It’s a risk to trust them to leave her, but she’s pretty sure they’ll obey. Adrian Pucey had been sitting in his particular chair by the fire watching. Pucey doesn’t particularly like Hermione but he’s no fan of Pansy’s either, and certainly not of her deducting points from her own house for a personal grudge. It’ll be up to him to take her down early, and Pucey is the top of the hierarchy. It won’t damage Hermione if he chooses to. 

Hermione walks straight to the nearest girls’ bathroom, and throws up. Then she cries. She hasn’t cried in these loos since first year. She used to come here a lot. Then she vanishes all trace of her tears and goes to the library. 

Much of the gossip about Hermione and Pansy’s fight is superseded by the return of Graham Montague, who has been recovered from a Vanishing Cabinet. The Slytherins darkly wonder who had put him in it. Montague could have easily died, they say, more shocked than she’s ever seen them. 

A few days later, Malfoy comes into the common room, big with the news that Potter is doing remedial potions.

“I know” Hermione says, rolling her eyes. 

“ _ And  _ he’s broken up with Cho Chang,” Malfoy tells her gleefully. This is news to Hermione but she doesn’t show it. 

He seems completely unbothered by her humiliation of his girlfriend. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t care enough to ask, and instead makes an excuse to go to bed early, getting herself out of the way before she says something to him she’ll regret. She is losing control of her own safety net. 

She thinks she’s never been more relieved to go home for the holidays. She goes to see Viktor’s team play the Wimbourne Wasps, and afterwards, she tells him he has been wonderful but she needs to focus on her exams and getting through school. 

She returns, not feeling especially refreshed, to find an invitation from Professor Snape to discuss her future career options. But any and all discussion about that is swiftly overwhelmed by the exit of the Weasley twins from Hogwarts. 

Her own meeting is not about careers. 

“Granger,” Snape says. “Here take these, any one of them will be less than suitable for a witch of your talents. Curse breaker, Magvocat, whatever you want. I’m sure you’ll be Minister for Magic before you’re forty if that’s what you want. Did you get that book?” 

“Yes. I’m practicing every night before bed.”

“Are you willing to try it now?” 

“Oh, yes - please.” 

“Very well, clear your mind then.”

He’s past her rudimentary shields in a moment and - of course - he sees the fight with Pansy Parkinson. 

“Where did you learn that spell?” he asks her. He’s angrier than she’s ever seen him, and she has no idea why. But she knows which one he means. 

She considers, and then tells him the truth. 

“I’ve also been having lessons with Remus Lupin. I asked him what the Death Eaters used at the World Cup because it gave me nightmares and I couldn’t find it in any book. It seemed so specifically humiliating.” 

“Lupin?” he asks and he is surprised enough to pull him out of his glowering for a split second. 

“Yes,” she says a little defiantly. “You said you didn’t have time to teach me everything so I hedged my bets.” 

He is betrayed into a smile at this, so quick you’d miss it if you didn’t know to look, and tells her to get out. She smiles back at him and obeys. He’s quite soft really, she reckons, if you learn to read him properly. 

After that, Hermione ignores everything but her exams. She spends every waking moment in the library. She sleeps peacefully enough in her warded bed. Parkinson avoids her, a pale wreck of the horrible girl she once was. Malfoy spouts off his usual rubbish about exams to hide his nerves and wind everyone else up, and joins Hermione in the library far more often than he ever has before. 

They’re easier than she expects. Malfoy calls her an absolute fucking nightmare six times a day but they swim through fairly well. 

Finally, it’s History of Magic. Hermione is reviewing her paper when it happens. She had already learned enough by third year to complete it. She doesn’t understand what takes everyone else so long. She thinks she’s missing something and looks back at her essay. 

Then Harry Potter collapses, screaming, and clutching his forehead. 

She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t acknowledge it at all. She just goes to the front of the Great Hall and hands in her answers. 

“Are you sure dear?” the invigilator says. 

“Yes, thank you. I’ve finished.” 

She turns and leaves and then she hides and waits. 

Potter is escorted out by Professor Tofty, who has been overseeing them all week. He is acting, and not very well, but it’s enough to convince the kind-eyed old wizard. The second the old man has crossed back into the Great Hall Potter races up the stairs so quickly she can’t keep up. But he heads to the hospital wing and she manages to catch him as he’s leaving. 

“What happened?” she asks, slightly out of breath, pulling him into a classroom. She can see Ron Weasley storming up the corridor. “Are you ill?” 

_ Why are you here?  _ she asks herself, and she doesn’t know. 

“Voldemort,” he says. “He’s got my godfather.”

“How do you know?” 

“I saw it,” he snarls, rubbing his forehead. “I keep  _ seeing  _ him.” 

She eyes his scar. 

“How do you know it’s real? It’s not that hard for someone of his prowess to send false dreams, especially if there’s some sort of connection. It would be easy to manipulate a vision like that.”

“False?” he asks, wrong-footed. His hand comes down. 

“Where does he have him?” she says, reaching for logic. 

“In the Ministry,” he replies wildly, pacing. “I’ve got to get there. I need to find Dumbledore.” 

“That seems extremely unlikely. The Ministry might be idiots but I can’t imagine why Voldemort would risk keeping a hostage there. I doubt he has that sort of man power yet.” 

Potter blinks at her suspiciously, as if suddenly realising who she is. 

“What do you care anyway?” he asks, and this time it’s his wand at her throat. She lets him. She doesn’t think he’d curse her, he’s not the type. 

“I have no idea,” she says honestly. “But seriously Potter, if Voldemort’s trying to get you to the Ministry you shouldn’t go. You’re just the sort of recklessly noble person who  _ would  _ go dashing off at the slightest mutter of danger and I’m sure he knows that. Can’t you floo this man or something, check he’s really gone?” 

“Only from Umbridge’s office. She’s closed all the other fireplaces.”

“I don’t want to know how you know that.”

“HE’S GOT SIRIUS,” he yells at her, and Ron Weasley bursts in followed by his sister and the Lovegood girl. 

“What’s she doing here?” Weasley asks immediately, hackles raised. 

“I don’t know,” Hermione and Potter say in unison and then glare at each other. 

“Look,” she says. “You need to get into Umbridge’s office and check if this is true. These two,” she gestures to the girls, “can be lookouts. I’ll try to head Malfoy off but his blood’ll be up after that performance and he’ll be looking for you. I’ll get him - oh. I know. Alright. I’ll distract Umbridge  _ and  _ Malfoy, and Potter you know the drill. If you tell  _ anyone  _ I was involved -”

“Yeah, yeah, Granger I know. Basilisks and undying declarations of love.” 

“What does _ that  _ mean?” Ginny Weasley asks suspiciously. “And why should we trust  _ you  _ ?” 

“No, you can. She’s - I don’t know what she is. She’s a nightmare. But she’ll help,” Potter says. 

Hermione smiles, pleased that he and Malfoy agree on this description. 

“You just bet I am. You need something to keep students away from the office as well.” 

“Luna and I can stand at either end of the corridor,” the Weasley girl says promptly, “and warn people not to go down there because someone’s let off a load of Garrotting Gas.” 

Hermione nods at her, surprised at the readiness with which this Gryffindor has come up with a half-decent lie. 

The redhead shrugs and says, “Fred and George were planning to do it before they left.”

“Better to actually let some off if they’ve given you any,” she points out. “Always best to lie with the truth. Do you know the spell to let you breathe?”

The Weasley girl nods.

“And Potter, you and Weasley can use that extremely handy little cloak of yours to get in right?” 

Potter’s lips quirk up at that. He looks a little calmer now. She wonders again why she’s there, and what he’d have done if she wasn’t. 

“Yeah. I forgot you knew about that. What are you going to do?” 

“I’m going to pull rank on Malfoy,” Hermione says grimly. 

“ _ You’re  _ going to pull rank?” Weasley says skeptically.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s my right to be on that stupid little squad and he knows it. I ground Parkinson into dust at the end of last term, it’s time I collected on my dues. And if that doesn’t work, I suppose I’ll have to let Umbridge catch me snogging him so she can lecture us about the impropriety of someone in his position touching someone like me etc. etc., although I really must emphasise that that is a last resort.” 

“I wouldn’t do that,” Potter murmurs. His eyes are  _ alight  _ . “You might catch something horrid. You sure about this?”

“God help me if you tell anyone -”

“Maiming. Declarations of love. Dirty great snakes.”

“Merlin, Potter. No need to threaten me with a good time. Give me twenty minutes to find them both before you start.”

He is smiling a little, despite his general distress, as he pulls out a familiar looking parchment. 

“I reckon I can help with that.”

“Did Remus give you that?” she demands. “Professor Lupin, I mean.”

“How - never mind. Malfoy’s in the Entrance Hall talking to Nott and Greengrass. Umbridge is on the second floor. Near the charms classroom. She’s on the move though, heading… maybe to the hall actually.” 

“Alright,” Hermione says. She conjures a mirror and pulls her hair loose. She’s got one of the elixirs in her pocket and pats a little on her cheeks and lips. She looks up to see them all staring aghast at her. “What? You people can go into battle in your own way, thanks very much.” 

She sweeps out of the room with as much dignity as she can muster.  _ Gryffindors  _ . She’s not going to try to manipulate Malfoy without looking exceptional. 

“Hello you lot,” Hermione murmurs, sliding into the group. She sends Malfoy a supremely dismissive look and turns her back on him to speak to Theo and Daphne. The easiest way to get Malfoy’s attention is to deny him attention. “Someone has let off Garrotting Gas upstairs. It is absolute  _ mayhem.  _ This school is going to the dogs, I swear. I might transfer to Ilvermorny next year at this rate.” 

“Granger,  _ there  _ you are,” Malfoy says and pulls her away. He’s like clockwork sometimes. 

She raises an eyebrow at him, looking as disdainful as she can. 

“What is it?” he asks, distracted from whatever he wanted to say. He is as perceptive as he is predictable. 

“Nothing,” she says airily. “What do you want?”

“No go on,” he’s leading her into an alcove. “You’re annoyed, tell me.” 

“Well I just thought - but it doesn’t matter. It’s almost summer, so I suppose I’ll... Anyway. How was your exam? Wasn’t Potter embarrassing? I couldn’t stand the noise personally.” 

This is a risk: he is very capable of riding this train for a while, but she’s banking on him having already imitated Potter to enough people outside the Hall for it to be mostly out of his system. She’s right. 

“Never-mind Potter,” he says, eyeing her closely. “You look out for blood and I don’t want this year to be the year you add M to your list of Ps. Besides,” he murmurs, stroking her jawline, “we haven’t talked in a while.” 

“I was distracted by exams. But. No, you’ll think it’s stupid.” She tries her very hardest to blush, and settles for lowering her lashes and peeping up at him through them. 

“Tell me.” He’s a little closer now. She bites her lip. He sighs. 

“It’s just… I thought you would have asked if I wanted to be on the Inquisitorial Squad after what I did to Parkinson last term. And you  _ didn’t  _ . I don’t really, I’m sure it’s stupid but…” 

His eyes widen. 

“Anyway,” she says, pulling away from him. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. I said I’d go down to the lake with someone so I’ll see you later.” 

“No Granger, wait. Come on, let’s go and talk to Umbridge. You’re right - it’s your badge really. Parkinson shouldn’t have anything over you, you’ve made that perfectly clear. We can find her now.” 

It’s almost too easy. He slides an arm around her shoulders casually, and she pulls away. She can’t be too permissive, it would be suspicious. They find Umbridge, heading towards the third floor. 

“Better go for a walk with her, that gas was  _ foul  _ and it’s just down from her office,” she whispers. 

“Professor,” Malfoy says smarmily. “We were wondering if you could give us some advice on a house matter.” 

Umbridge looks absolutely charmed by this, and is more than happy to be ushered out into the courtyard by a disturbingly flirtatious Malfoy. 

“The thing is, I’ve made a bit of a blunder,” he confesses to Professor Umbridge. Her eyes widen disbelievingly, making her look even more like a toad. “We have, as you will remember yourself, a very particular system in Slytherin House…” 

He explains to Umbridge that Hermione - ‘my parents will vouch for her you know’ - should have been on the squad. He hasn’t raised it because of exams, but going into the next year, with her steady hand on the Hogwarts tiller… etc. etc. etc. 

Hermione watches, fascinated. She’s never seen this version of Malfoy. He’s confident and charming and powerful and just a little tiny bit disdainful. The closest he’s ever come before, that she’s seen, was at the Yule Ball. 

“Well, we’d better get Miss Granger a badge right away. I had no idea she was a person of - well. Never mind all that.” Her head twitches suddenly as though she’s heard a sound. “Now children, we’ll continue this later. I’ve got some very pressing business. Very pressing indeed. In fact, Miss Granger as you are now one of our Favoured Few… come along. We must be quick. Chop chop. Go and round up your peers, Mr Malfoy. I think Harry Potter is trying to break into my office.” 

Hermione’s heart plummets. There’s no way Potter has had time to make his call, first of all, and second of all there’s no way he is going to believe she isn’t to blame for this. She follows Malfoy and Umbridge. She’s made her bed and she’s going to have to see if there’s a way she can help. 

_ Why  _ she has got herself involved at all is a mystery. 

Malfoy rounds up a group of Slytherins, including Millicent Bulstrode and several of the older boys in what seems like no time. There’s two of them for every one of Potter’s pals, and it doesn’t take long before they’re all disarmed and being shoved towards Umbridge’s office. 

Hermione half-heartedly grabs Ginny Weasley and mutters in her ear to play along for now, and the group of Slytherins and their captives - which now include, for some reason, - Patil and Longbottom crowd into the office where Ron Weasley and Harry Potter have already been trapped by the Headmistress. 

“Good, good. Well, it looks as though Hogwarts will shortly be a Weasley-free zone, doesn’t it?” the horrible woman asks. Malfoy laughs. 

Eventually Umbridge sends him to get Snape. Two things are very quickly evident to Hermione upon the Professor’s arrival. The first any fool could get, which is that Umbridge has been unsuccessfully trying to dose Harry Potter with Veritaserum, a rare and highly regulated potion. The second is that Severus Snape is on Harry Potter’s side in whatever battle is happening. To the casual observer he would seem his usual self. But Hermione is not a casual observer: Snape is deeply concerned by what he sees. 

Potter starts yelling about Snuffles and hidden places and Hermione’s mind, racing already, stumbles over Potter’s evident inability to read Snape as well as she can. He is  _ clearly  _ rushing off to help, but that stupid boy doesn’t believe him. She wants to scream at him. She tries to catch his eye but he’s too wild now. 

All too soon Umbridge is threatening him with the Cruciatus curse. 

“Is this what you were doing in the forest the other day?” Hermione asks, her calm, level voice cutting across the room. Potter stares at her, furious. She’d thought nothing of it at the time - but he’d been with that half-giant friend of his, who’s been looking very beaten up all term and came out sporting fresh injuries… there must be something down there and even if there isn’t, the forest is a dangerous place with more opportunity of escape than this office. She continues, encouragingly, “What is it? Are you hiding something for Dumbledore?” 

“Shut up, Granger,” Potter snarls, convincingly. 

“How did you know we were trying to speak to Dumbledore?” Ron Weasley roars, catching on quicker than she’d expected. 

“Any fool could have guessed that, Weasley,” she hisses back, and he’s off, ranting about nosy Slytherins and how they’ll never find it anyway. Potter gives a good go of struggling to try to get to Weasley to silence him and the other Gryffindors join in trying to silence Ron Weasley from giving away too much in a fit of bragging anger. 

“Is it a weapon?” Umbridge demands, caught, hook, line and sinker. The Gryffindors give unconvincing denials, and they all set off for the forest. Hermione keeps her wand trained on Ginny Weasley and is pleased that no one has yet thought of tying the captives up. Wizards seem to think a person without a wand is a useless person. She will have to remember that. 

“Where is it?” Umbridge is asking them as they head down the grounds. 

“I’ll never tell you that,” Potter hisses at her. He and Weasley both send Hermione slightly baffled looks, and she takes her cue. 

“They came out over here. Potter and the half-breed and someone else. Maybe the idiot over there,” Hermione says confidently, pointing at a spot near Hagrid’s hut and then at Neville Longbottom. “They were carrying something,” she says inventively, “and they looked very pleased.” 

“Lead on then, Miss Granger,” Umbridge says. 

“Someone else needs to take this then,” Hermione says, pushing Ginny Weasley so the girl stumbles forward slightly. 

“Miss Bulstrode, take over custody please,” Umbridge orders. 

Hermione pulls a button transfigured to look like a wand as best she could under the circumstances and hands it to Millie, slips the real one into Ginny Weasley’s pocket, makes sure it jabs her to let her know it’s there, and shoves her at the other Slytherin girl to hide the movement. 

Hermione leads on down a fairly well-trodden path trying to make as much noise as possible. She has absolutely no idea why Potter had been in the forest but she’s thought of something else, something dangerous, something  _ designed  _ for Umbridge. 

Unfortunately it might get them all killed on the way. She pulls up as the hoof-prints get fresher. She’s really never liked horses and she is not looking forward to this encounter. 

“Professor, can I have a word?” she says loudly when they’re just a little bit inside the forest. That should give the Weasley girl plenty of opportunity. “I’ve just thought of something.” 

Umbridge looks confused but Hermione gives her her best wide-eyed and worried look. 

“Can you hear that?” she whispers to Umbridge as they step off the path. There isn’t anything yet, she just wants her on edge. 

“No, what is it dear?” the woman asks impatiently. 

“I thought I heard screaming… It’s just… if it really is a weapon for Dumbledore it would be so powerful. And I trust Malfoy of course, but the others… I don’t know if we should let them see. What if they wanted to keep it?” 

Hermione has never had to be confiding and trusting before. She’s not sure she’s pulling it off but Umbridge nods thoughtfully. 

“Maybe they should wait here or go back to the castle… yes… that would be best. And if something were to happen to Potter it might be better if there were fewer…” 

“Warrington,” she shouts back. “Take these students back to my office. Malfoy, bring Potter and Weasley. The  _ older  _ Weasley, with the big mouth.” 

“Big nose too,” Hermione says, wittily, to Malfoy as she steps back past him. He glances up at Ron Weasley instinctively and she summons Harry Potter’s wand from his pocket. Malfoy laughs jeeringly, still looking at Weasley. It rings out through the trees. 

“Bulstrode,” Hermione calls back, a little louder than necessary. “Watch that Weasley girl - she’s quicker than she looks.” 

They wind onwards a little bit further. The trees are densely packed now and it’s dark under the summer foliage. They come out into a clearing and Hermione is relieved to see the bright afternoon light. She’d been starting to worry they’ll have to trek all day and into the night. Then the first arrow flies overhead, and suddenly the clearing is ringing out with the hiss of arrows and the sound of hooves. There are so many of them it sounds like thunder. 

Hermione drops, respectfully, to her knees and keeps her eyes to the floor. She’s read about centaurs. This is not going to be pretty. 

“Who are you?” one calls out. Hermione keeps her head down. Potter drops to the floor beside her.

“Really, Granger?” he whispers. “Centaurs? This is the stupidest fucking plan I’ve ever -”

She slides him his wand. He shuts up. But just for a moment, hidden by the bracken on the forest floor, he puts his hand over hers. 

“I asked you who you are, human,” the centaur repeats. 

“I am Dolores Umbridge!” Umbridge replies. Her voice emerges even more high-pitched than usual. She sounds terrified, but she blusters on, “Senior Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic and Headmistress and High Inquisitor of Hogwarts!”

The centaurs stir at this. 

“You are from the Ministry of Magic?” 

“That’s right! So be very careful! By the laws laid down by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, any attack by half-breeds such as yourselves on a human -”

This has an even more enlivening effect. 

“What did you call us?” another one calls out, wildly angry. 

Hermione had known that Umbridge was stupid and arrogant and all the rest, but it’s even worse than she’d thought. Malfoy drops down on her other side, groaning in fear, as the centaurs leap forward and then over them to attack Umbridge. It doesn’t take long, and then they become the focus. 

“Don’t fucking say anything,” she hisses. It’s to Malfoy but she hopes Potter and Weasley hear it too. “Please.”

Hermione had been vindictive enough to want Malfoy terrified, but she knows he is capable of running his mouth - and all of them with it - right into terrible danger, especially when he’s scared. 

Hermione stands, keeping her head low, and bows respectfully. 

“Please forgive us for trespassing on your lands,” she says as calmly as she can. “We have come here by accident and meant you no harm. We accept any punishment you see fit.” 

She’s read this in a book, of course. 

“They are just foals,” one of them comments. 

“They brought the Ministry woman here,” another disputes. 

“This one is respectful,” a third interjects. 

Hermione goes onto one knee, and unclasps the bracelet from her wrist. She recites the customary speech offering a token as tribute. Eventually they agree on a price for their free passage out of the forest, which involves a suspiciously high number of wine casks. The centaurs escort the four students out of the woods. 

She honestly can’t believe all three boys manage to stay quiet the entire time. Of course, it doesn’t last past the tree-line. 

Potter draws his wand on Malfoy. She wishes he’d had the sense to stun her first. 

“Who’s got your wand?” she asks Weasley. 

“I dunno, Umbridge I think.” 

“Accio Ron Weasley’s wand,” she says. Malfoy and Potter are distracted, blowing off some much needed steam. They’re yelling about the forest and something to do with first year, which seems highly incongruous, and exchanging some very badly aimed spells. The wand flies into her hand a moment later. Umbridge had had it. She hands it to him. 

“Keep that pointed at my throat alright? We need to look like we’re in a stand-off.” 

“You’re the weirdest Slytherin I’ve ever met,” he tells her, but obediently holds it to her neck and does a half-decent job at looking tall and menacing. 

“Any bright ideas now, Malfoy?” she calls out.

“Not really, now you’ve managed to  _ lose Umbridge  _ ,” he snaps back, looking round. 

“Yes, thank you, that little detail had naturally  _ thoroughly  _ escaped me. I absolutely missed the part where I led the Headmistress into an extremely dangerous and frankly enormous herd of centaurs,” she hisses, enjoying herself. 

Not before time, the other Weasley, Patil, Longbottom and Lovegood all turn up. The girl Weasley stuns Malfoy, which is a relief, and Hermione and the boy Weasley lower their wands. 

“Granger,” Potter says, “you are absolutely, terrifyingly insane.” 

“Thank you,” she replies politely. 

“Thank you,” he says, with that earnestness she finds so discomforting. “Really. I don’t know what we would have done.” 

Ron Weasley turns to fill the others in, and Hermione is left standing looking up into Harry Potter’s green eyes. They’re much further up than they used to be. He’s grown even more this year, she thinks stupidly. 

“I need to go,” he says.

“Are you sure about this? I still think you’re making a mistake. I’m pretty sure Snape was haring off to speak to Dumbledore by the way, you’re not very good at reading him.”

“Good - then he’ll meet us there,” he says decisively, turning back to his little group. “I’m sure Sirius is still alive. But I don’t know how we’re going to get there.”

After an appallingly Gryffindor row about broomsticks and who is and is not going to be allowed to run off towards near-certain death, they are scrambling onto what they claim are thestrals. Potter turns to say something to her. But that way lies danger.

“Weasley,” Hermione calls out. “It’s time.”

“Really, Granger?” The redhead says, incredulously. 

“Get on with it.” 

He stuns her, looking only half-annoyed to have to do it, and then everything is gone. 

When she comes to, it’s almost dark, and Malfoy is standing over her. 

“Thank Merlin,” he says, holding out a hand to pull her up. “I’ve never had to bring someone round before. What an absolute travesty of a day. We’ve missed the end of exams party, I am freezing, and you’ve given our Headmistress to the centaurs.” 

“I’m not sure I’m that sorry about that part,” Hermione confesses as they trudge up towards the castle, “she was about the stupidest woman I’ve ever seen. Mouthing off to fifty armed centaurs like that. Honestly, I reckon she deserves whatever’s coming to her.” 

“Yes well I suppose that’s hard to deny.” He grins for a moment, but then his face grows gloomy. “And then there’s the part where we let Harry Potter race off to do something that will no doubt turn out to be  _ endlessly heroic  _ .” 

“Let’s just tell everyone Umbridge dragged us all to the forest, and then the centaurs freed him,” she says rolling her eyes at him. “He gets special treatment from everyone else. Didn’t I hear he was on first-name terms with that horse teacher before classes had even started?” 

His eyes widen. 

“Granger, you clever little  _ minx  _ . Remind me never to get on your bad side.” 

She smiles sweetly at him. 

“Malfoy, you were never on my  _ good  _ side” 

But twelve hours later, she’s the one guarding the door for him while he destroys a classroom in tears. Azkaban, as everyone knows, is a terrible place for anyone, let alone a beloved father. 

The next times she sees Harry Potter on a quiet afternoon a few days later, the world has changed and so has he. She’s walking next to Malfoy with his stupid goons behind them. It’s been a while since he had them around so much, but he seems to be regressing. He keeps Hermione close, too, though. He stops dead as he steps into the Entry Hall and looks around. 

“You’re dead, Potter.” 

“Funny,” the black-haired boy says casually, “you’d think I’d have stopped walking around.” 

“You’re going to pay,” Malfoy hisses. “I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done to my father.”

“Well, I’m terrified now. I s’pose Lord Voldemort’s just a warm-up act compared to you lot - what’s the matter? He’s your dad’s mate, isn’t he? Not scared of his name are you?”

Hermione suppresses a laugh and heads outside. She can feel Potter’s eyes following her, but she’s not sticking around to help with that row.  _ Her  _ father isn’t a vile Death Eater. He’s a dentist, and a very nice one at that. 

The castle’s immediate surroundings are dotted with students in little clusters. It’s a glorious Sunday afternoon in the June interlude between OWLs finishing and the start of NEWTs. Hermione picks her way past the little gatherings, ignoring the stares as she does. She knows they whisper about her, the Muggleborn who sits at meals and in classes next to a boy whose Death Eater father just got put in Azkaban. She tries not to care. She finds a spot down near the lake, tucked well out of sight, and pulls her robe off. She’s wearing Muggle shorts and a t-shirt underneath. She basks in the sun and thinks she doesn’t care if anyone finds her looking like that, however shocked the Wizards would be. 

(She knows who’s going to find her.) 

He comes about half an hour later, when she’s almost dozing off, her book discarded beside her. Exams are over and everything is terrible and it would have been the first moment of peace she’s had all year if she hadn’t been waiting and hoping for a boy she hates to find her in secret. 

“Lucky you’ve got that thoroughly illegal map,” Hermione says without opening her eyes. She knows it’s him, because her whole body has gone electric. 

“Yeah,” he says, “lucky.” 

He sounds about as dejected as any human she’s ever heard. She wonders what she should do. 

“I just wanted to say -”

“Save it, Potter,” she says, and sits up, opening her bag and getting out the bottle she’s stashed inside it. “Here. Drink this and just try to relax for once in your life will you?” 

He snorts at this but takes a swig anyway. 

She leans back against the rock-face and enjoys the way his eyes catch on her bare legs. He hands her back the bottle. It’s cool and sharp going down and sends her stomach buzzing. 

“He died you know,” he tells her, staring hard at the lake, “my godfather, I mean.”

“Was it the Dark Lord? Sorry. Everyone calls him that in Slytherin, I do it to blend in.  _ Voldemort.  _ ”

“No. It was Bellatrix Lestrange.” 

Malfoy’s aunt. Just another bit of bad blood between them. She could tell Potter how terrified Malfoy was when he saw she’d escaped, how even he is scared of her, how people whisper that she is crazy. But she doesn’t think any of that will help so she just hands him back the bottle. 

“How did you know it wasn’t real? You always seem to know stuff.” 

“I had to learn a lot about people to survive in Slytherin,” she says after a moment. “Mostly by watching.” 

“Can you believe,” he says, when they’ve been silent long enough that the bottle is half empty, “we were ever worried about exams?” 

Hermione laughs but it’s a bit mechanical. She’s slightly worried Harry Potter is going to cry. She wonders what it is about her that encourages boys to have their breakdowns in her presence. 

But Harry Potter does not cry and he does not have a breakdown. Instead he slides a hand under her chin, turns her face around, and brushes her lips, very gently. It’s almost not a kiss at all. It’s more the promise of a kiss than a kiss. But her heart is racing anyway and she suddenly feels very, very awake. 

“I’ve got to go,” he says. His eyes are a little older than they were a few days ago, and a lot sadder. 

“See you around, Potter.” 

She flops back down and starts working on her Occlumency. She’s pretty sure she’s going to need it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously I am playing fast and loose with vast segments of original dialogue. I hope that's enjoyable. Thank you for the TREMENDOUS response. The next two chapters are written. Eagled-eyed people will note I've already updated the chapter count. I think it's going up again. Cannot emphasise enough that this was meant to be a one-shot and instead I've written 33,000 words in just shy of a week. So. 
> 
> Thanks to Sally, who I love, and to all of you. I've been amazed by all your lovely comments. Thank you.


	5. An inappropriate and untraditional witch

The summer is horrible. Partly because of the deeply depressing mists that have Hermione recalling the misery of her first three years at Hogwarts, that mean she finds her mother — her brave, warm, radical mother — crying in the kitchen one night remembering, for no good reason, the fight she had to be taken seriously as a woman in her field in the early 1970s. The mists that make her gentle, good-natured father’s brows draw together to conceal some unspoken sadness of his own. The mists that are almost certainly magical.

Other bad things happen, things that even make it to the Muggle newspapers. A bridge collapses, killing dozens of people. A hurricane in Dorset. Susan Bones’s aunt dead. 

And in the Magical newspapers, his name comes up over and over again. _The Chosen One_ , they call him. The most dangerous boy she could have chosen to let linger in her better dreams, and haunt her worse ones. 

It’s Hermione’s last summer holiday with the Trace on her magic. She hates it. She feels stifled not being able to cast and on edge all the time. It’s like having a hand tied behind her back, she tells her mother. 

The ban on magic is alleviated when she spends a few days at Greengrass Manor. It’s a beautiful house with an extraordinary garden. No one there, she discovers enviously, cares if underage Daphne and Astoria do some spells. They’re perfectly pleasant people who describe Hermione as ‘raised by Muggles’. She bites her tongue and lets them do it for three days before going back to her very ordinary home with mixed feelings. She wonders what it would have been like to grow up in a home with so much wonder in it. 

She can’t bring herself to be grateful to Malfoy for the lie he has spun, but she’s not stupid enough to deny it either. 

Hermione worries about her parents. _Raised by Muggles_. What, she wonders, would the Death Eaters do to punish them for daring to bring up a magical child? She’s never asked Malfoy what the supposed truth of her birth is. She knows she’ll have to one day. Plausible deniability is long out of reach. She hasn’t heard a word from him. 

Remus Lupin comes and wards the house. She’s not sure it would be enough, but it’s something. 

She persuades her parents to leave the practice to their junior partners and take a long holiday in France, ruthlessly reminding them it’ll be their last all together before she leaves school and enters the workforce. France is out of reach of the Ministry of Magic’s Trace and out of reach of Death Eaters. It’s out of reach of Lupin and his tutelage too, but he’s been finding it harder to find the time himself and has looked more gravely worried every time she’s seen him. But France is not, as it turns out, out of reach of the Ministry or Hogwarts owl post: Hermione gets eleven Outstandings, and an award for coming top of the year. The award is a signed first edition of _Hogwarts, a History_. 

The holiday is a respite. The sun and the vivid colours — the blue sky, the olive trees, the red rock — and the smell of warm sap and warm earth and baking bread all chase away that horrible mist that had drifted across the country in early July. 

But no amount of magic can stop July turning into August and stretching its fingers towards September, and they have to go home. And then, all too soon, it’s time to go back to Hogwarts. It’s not that Hermione doesn’t have certain things she is looking forward to, but the thought of leaving her parents without protection makes her feel a little sick. 

They agree there’s no need for them to go to the station once more. They haven’t seen anyone from the magical world barring Hermione herself, Viktor, and Remus Lupin since the start of her fourth year. All she can do is hope that out of sight is out of mind, and that the protections on their house and practice will hold. She tells herself there’s no reason for anyone to go after them. She knows her own behaviour that year mustn’t create a reason. She can’t wait to practice Occlumency properly with Professor Snape. 

Hermione’s eyes find Harry Potter on the platform and they’re by no means the only ones looking. He’s grown again and not just upwards. She’s never seen him looking so _well_ at the start of the year before and the realisation makes her wonder what his home life is like. Maybe he’s not so spoilt after-all. He’s tanned and if his shock of black hair is messy he’s also had a half-decent haircut. He looks well-fed for once and his shoulders have got broader. His green eyes ignore all the other curious stares and meet hers over the shoulder of the thin, balding redheaded man he is talking to rather intently. He stumbles over his words as he sees her. She yanks her gaze away, and wishes she had better control of herself. Nothing could be more dangerous. 

“Granger,” Malfoy calls out like a drowning man who’s just seen a lifeline. He has grown too and is looking very pleased with himself. He’s as arrogant as she’s ever seen him, in fact, but Hermione can see an odd sheen of fear underneath it. She walks over to where he’s standing with his snooty-looking mother. “Mother, this is Hermione Granger. Granger, my mother, Narcissa Malfoy.” 

“A pleasure,” Narcissa says. She doesn’t sound like she means it. There’s no mistaking the worry — almost panic — in her blue eyes every time they settle on her son. But she keeps Hermione chatting on the platform for a couple of minutes with some inane pleasantries. 

The first whistle blows. 

“Come on, Granger, give me that,” he says, taking her trunk. “Mother, I’ll write.” 

He kisses her pale cheek. Her eyes flutter closed but not before Hermione spots a tear building. One blink, and it’s gone. 

“Miss Granger, it was a pleasure to finally meet you. Keep an eye on my son,” Narcissa says, extending a hand. 

Hermione, baffled, takes it, promises to do her best, and then follows Malfoy onto the train. 

He stows her trunk in a compartment where Zabini, Nott, Crabbe and Goyle are all lounging already. 

“We need to go to the prefects’ carriage,” she reminds Malfoy. 

“You go on,” he says carelessly. 

It’s not like him to pass up an opportunity to show off his badge but she’s not his keeper so she leaves him to it. He doesn’t follow her. She doesn’t have much of a chance to find out why. Less than ten minutes after she gets back to the boys’ compartment a younger student knocks on the door. 

“What is it?” she asks, vaguely recognising the fourth-year Ravenclaw. 

“I’m supposed to deliver these to Hermione Granger and Blaise Zabini,” he mutters, looking absolutely terrified as he takes in the inhabitants. 

Zabini takes two scrolls of parchment, which are tied with violet ribbon, and tells the kid to shoo. He hands one to Hermione. 

“What is it?” Malfoy demands. 

“An invitation to lunch,” Hermione says, confused. “Who’s Horace Slughorn?” 

“Give me that,” Malfoy says, seizing it. “Well, well, well, Granger you have _arrived_ ,” he continues sarcastically. “Slughorn was Head of Slytherin in my parents’ day.” 

“He likes to collect the best and brightest,” Nott tells her, looking highly entertained. “I suppose Malfoy and I are no longer in favour.” 

Draco sneers at this and tosses the scroll back to her. No one seems to think Crabbe and Goyle have been unfairly left out. 

“How irritating,” Hermione says. “I wanted to read that new runes book. Oh well,” she sighs regretfully. “Come on Zabini, let’s go and be bright and beautiful or whatever this is.” 

He smirks at Malfoy and then follows her out of the compartment. 

They arrive in compartment C to find Ginny Weasley, looking as confused as Hermione feels but would never show, Cormac McLaggen, Marcus Belby, and a very fat man with a bald head, a silvery moustache like a walrus, and gleaming gold buttons on his tightly stretched velvet waistcoat. 

He introduces himself as Professor Slughorn with a slightly damp, but surprisingly firm, handshake. 

“Oho, yes Miss Granger. I’ve heard a great deal about you,” he chortles. “You’ve made quite an impression on young Severus, you know. And some other sources, I might add. A rare jewel in Slytherin’s crown I daresay.” 

She obediently takes a seat next to Blaise, who looks extremely disdainful at the company. His expression only grows icier at the entrance of Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom. 

“Really?” he hisses, without moving his mouth at all. “ _This_ is the company we’re to keep?” 

But Hermione isn’t listening to him. 

“Harry, m’boy!” Slughorn, says leaping up much more quickly than she’d have thought him capable of. “Good to see you, good to see you! And you must be Mr. Longbottom!”

Potter looks embarrassed to be directly addressed, and stands awkwardly as Slughorn introduces him to a set of people it’s clear he’s never noticed before. 

“And of course, I know you know Miss Granger,” the Professor says, with what Hermione considers extreme tactlessness. 

“Er yeah, sort of,” Potter mutters, wincing. 

Hermione is too annoyed to be amused, and gives her iciest nod. She does wonder in what capacity Harry Potter has betrayed knowledge of her to this teacher, but there’s no opportunity to ask. 

“Friend of yours?” Blaise asks sardonically, gaze resting on Potter. 

“One of my nearest and dearest,” Hermione says matching his tone. 

Slughorn goes around the table trying to bring out something worthy in its occupants and force-feeding them pheasant. 

“Now, you, Cormac,” he says, “I happen to know you see a lot of your Uncle Tiberius, because he has a rather splendid picture of the two of you hunting nogtails in, I think, Norfolk?”

“Oh, yeah, that was fun, that was,” McLaggen replies boastfully. “We went with Bertie Higgs and Rufus Scrimgeour; this was before he became Minister, obviously —”

Hermione accidentally catches Potter’s gleaming green eyes, and a flicker of amusement and something _else_ , something _more_ dances between them before she can look away. 

“And now,” Slughorn says, savouring the words with the same joy he has given to the game pie, “Harry Potter! Where to begin? I feel I barely scratched the surface when we met over the summer! ‘The Chosen One,’ they’re calling you now!”

It takes a great deal of willpower to send a mocking little glance up to Zabini at this, but as he is staring at Potter with the utmost contempt she feels like she can get away with it too. Hermione has never told Zabini - and never will — but when she was learning to forge the pieces of armour necessary to survive in Slytherin she had taken him as her model. It’s very easy to hide behind blank disdain and Blaise is very, very good at it. 

The afternoon descends into an extremely trite discussion about whether Potter is the chosen one. He looks increasingly uncomfortable. Hermione forces herself to turn away and chat solely to Zabini but they keep being interrupted by Cormac McLaggen, who is extremely handsome and extremely annoying. Hermione learns nothing she wanted to know about anyone at the table, except that Harry Potter tenses his jaw every time he hears the phrase Chosen One. As Potter isn’t subtle in the least, his attempts to be casual about it seem like a red flag. Hermione thinks about the absolute state he’d been in, on that strange summer afternoon she has locked into a little compartment in the back of her mind, and she begins to wonder if there’s some truth in the myth. The idea makes her feel furiously angry and a little bit sick. 

She follows Zabini out of the carriage and catches his eyes trailing Ginny Weasley, who is still in her Muggle clothes. She’s becoming very pretty, with long dark red hair and even longer legs. She spends a lot of time looking at Harry Potter. 

When they get back to the compartment, Zabini steps back to allow her to enter first, which is about as close as he comes to being friendly. Malfoy has his head in Pansy Parkinson’s lap, but he sits up as they enter and makes room for her. The sight of Parkinson distracts Hermione from whatever nonsense is going on with Zabini and Goyle - really, you might as well pick a fight with a troll — and slants her eyes at the black-haired girl. She’s looking her best, but at the sight of Hermione she goes white. 

“Parkinson,” Hermione says in her coldest, most dismissive voice, dragging her eyes up from the other girls shoes to her eyes. Parkinson gets up and leaves without a word, and Malfoy places his head in Hermione’s lap instead. He’s never done this before and she thinks it’s altogether too familiar, so she pinches him, hard, on his neck. 

There is something uncomfortable about the mood Draco Malfoy is in that day. She’d sensed it: she has been acutely attuned to his moods since very early in their first year, when his moods could mean violence for her. He’s pleased in the way that usually means something she thinks is bad has happened, like Dumbledore being made to leave Hogwarts or an innocent animal being sentenced to death, but she’s never seen it have quite such an ugly underside before. She’s not sure what it is. But she can sense it.

He doesn’t get up, but shifts onto his back so he can stare up into her face. He’s making a big performance of it, which is odd because none of the people are the sort of audience he usually tries to flirt with her in front of. 

“What did Slughorn want?” 

“To have a party that specifically excludes rude young men who think lounging around looks cool,” she says, summoning her Runes book and propping it up on his head. 

He sits up and pinches her back. 

“You’re in a _lovely_ mood. Why don’t you go and torture some children?”

“Unlike you, I don’t need to take on first years to find someone at my ability level,” she murmurs sweetly, her mood somewhat improved by his irritation. 

“Who else was there?” 

She pouts down at him. “Should I have taken you as my plus-one, Malfoy? You don’t seem to enjoy being left out in the cold.” 

“Stop playing with your food, Granger,” Zabini drawls. “You know perfectly well it was Slughorn trying to make-up to well connected people — only to discover they aren’t many. McLaggen, some idiot called Belby, and Longbottom, Potter, and that Weasley girl.” 

Malfoy is curling a tendril of Hermione’s hair around his finger — something he hasn’t done in a long time — but he drops it at this and sits up. 

“He invited _Longbottom_?”

“Well, I assume so, as Longbottom was there,” Zabini replies and Hermione admires his really incomparable air of indifference.

“What’s Longbottom got to interest Slughorn? Potter, precious Potter, obviously he wanted a look at ‘the Chosen One,’ but that Weasley girl! What’s so special about her?” 

“Mmm, do tell us, Zabini,” Hermione cuts in, keen to deflect Malfoy away from his favourite rant about Potter before it can start. “What’s so special about the Weasley girl? Quite pretty isn’t she?” 

He’s _almost_ betrayed into a scowl. 

“I wouldn’t touch a filthy little blood traitor like her whatever she looked like,” he says coldly. 

“I wonder where that puts me,” she says mournfully, despising him. “I was really hoping this would be my year with a shot at you.” 

Hermione has found that reminding them of her blood-status is a fairly reliable punishment for rude comments about it. It’s a trap, because they can’t admit they know she’s Muggleborn and they can’t outwardly say she’s not and give her the chance to deny Draco’s lies.

She smiles cooly at him. But Zabini is not so easily caught. His mask of contempt fades and he sends her a lascivious smirk. 

“Granger,” he says caressingly, “I thought you’d never ask.” 

Malfoy snorts a little crossly at this and leans back against his own seat. 

“Well, whatever, I don’t care about his stupid little club. I probably won’t even be at Hogwarts next year.” 

This is clearly what he’s been dying to say, but he looks at her rather uncertainly. She gives him no encouragement, and makes a show of becoming absorbed in her Ancient Runes book. 

“Mother wants me to complete my education, but personally, I don’t see it as that important these days. I mean, think about it... When the Dark Lord takes over, is he going to care how many O.W.L.s or N.E.W.T.s anyone’s got? Of course he isn’t. It’ll be all about the kind of service he received, the level of devotion he was shown.”

Crabbe and Goyle, with their usual sparkling contributions to the conversation, are sitting silently with their mouths open, looking extremely impressed. 

“And you think you’ll be able to do something for him?” asked Zabini scathingly. “Sixteen years old and not even fully qualified yet?” 

This is an interesting reaction. Zabini doesn’t often come for Malfoy’s throat. She wonders if there’s more going on behind his mask than he lets on. 

“I’ve just said, haven’t I? Maybe he doesn’t care if I’m qualified. Maybe the job he wants me to do isn’t something that you need to be qualified for.” 

“I’m sure Dumbledore’s lot will be absolutely quaking at that,” Hermione says without looking up from her book. “I know I, for one, feel much safer.” 

She does glance up then, and sends him her very sweetest smile. But inside, she feels like she’s just jumped into an abyss and she’s falling down, down, down into the dark. 

“I can see Hogwarts,” Malfoy says, and the boys pull their robes on. Hermione, who put hers on hours ago, stares down at her book. She can’t quite make out the letters. When she looks up it’s just her and Malfoy. 

“If you have done it, I wish you hadn’t,” she says. She’s always been able to be honest with him when they’re alone, up to a point. That point is Harry Potter. She sinks her head into her hands. “Those are people like _me._ ”

“They’re nothing like you,” he says, and the very sad thing is she thinks he really does believe that. “We’ll talk about it later, yeah? I just want to check something, you go ahead.” 

“What do you want to check?” she asks.

She knows him much too well. She knows him better than she knows anyone, really, maybe even better than she knows herself. This conversation is still Draco Malfoy with an audience, Draco Malfoy out for blood, not the Draco Malfoy who will let down his guard enough to cry and blow up a room in front of her. 

“Why are you so nosy?” 

“Why are you such a liar?” 

They stare at each other for a moment. 

“Fine,” he mutters. “Let’s go. Merlin, you are so _irritating_ sometimes.” 

Hermione wonders how she can walk calmly to a carriage and swing herself in in front of a boy who very likely has branded himself with a symbol that means torture and death for people born like her. She finds the answer and it’s just as pathetic as she’d feared. If Malfoy sees her as an exception, as not _really_ , then she sees him just the same. How can he be a monster, when he is also family? 

She thinks that her sixth year might just prove to be the very worst one yet. 

Things swiftly improve once lessons start, however. All Hermione’s teachers — even the ones who are hesitant to unbend to Slytherins - make a special point to congratulate her on her clean sweep of Os and welcome her back to their classes. She’s taking one more NEWT than most of her peers, of course, though she knows Theo Nott is taking five as well, and several Ravenclaws. Theo is also the person who always beats her in her favourite subject, Arithmancy. It’s hard to be truly bitter though: he is naturally gifted at it in the same way Potter is naturally gifted on a broomstick. Professor Snape’s extreme competence in teaching their class a load of things he already taught her the year before has her well on her way to feeling relaxed, and then they go to Potions. 

So few people are taking it that all the Houses are together. There’s an even number of Ravenclaws, an odd number of Slytherins, and one Hufflepuff. Hermione, Greengrass, Malfoy, Nott and Zabini eye each other warily. One of them is going to end up with Ernie McMillan as a desk-mate. 

“I’m sitting with Granger,” Malfoy announces. “So one of you can do it.” 

“Greengrass is the least likely to use him as an ingredient,” Zabini points out, ruthlessly. 

“But I’m sitting with Theo,” Daphne says. She’s become so angelically beautiful that none of the boys can bring themselves to argue. Theo looks delighted. 

“I’ll do it,” Hermione says, rolling her eyes. “Honestly. Zabini can’t, Malfoy, he’s almost as toxic as you are.”

She wouldn’t have volunteered, if he hadn’t been so high-handed. 

“Granger, do I need to remind you of a certain display last year?” Malfoy drawls at her. “If any one of us is _dangerous_ to-”

He stops, and leans back against the wall, supremely casual. 

Potter and Weasley are walking up the corridor. 

“No one told me it was bring your dunce to class day,” she murmurs to Malfoy. It’s always best to soothe him with a little poison before he interacts with Potter, so his blood isn’t up too high. 

He smirks, but the hatred in his gaze seems to have hit a new level. “Not your best.”

The dungeon is already full of bubbling cauldrons. Hermione goes straight over to have a look at them, and by the time she turns around everyone else is sitting down.

The best thing about Malfoy having to sit with Zabini is that he is treated to the full effect of the portly man’s effusive pleasure with that contemptuous boy. The worst thing is that the Ravenclaws have taken their seats at one table of four, the Slytherin boys and Daphne have automatically occupied the other. That leaves one seat left to fill and Hermione has to fight for a look of disdain as she takes it. It’s next to Ernie MacMillan, and across from Ron Weasley, and that means, of course, that Harry Potter is diagonally opposite. Their eyes flicker together for a moment, clash, and break away. 

The potion nearest them smells unbelievably seductive. A feeling of great contentment steals over her. It’s leather, the vanilla-scent of old paper, salt and wood and beeswax and sun-warmed pine resin and —. She meets Harry Potter’s eyes again, and there’s no clash now but a moment — just the very briefest of moments — where he gives her a slow, lazy smile. She’s never seen that smile before, never seen him look so relaxed. His eyes have gone very dark. 

Amortentia, she thinks, bitterly, and deeply regrets volunteering herself to be the odd Slytherin out. Now she knows what Harry Potter would have looked like if he hadn’t had that scar and everything that came with it, and she knows it’s going to haunt her. 

Less than an hour later, however, she’s spitting with rage. Nothing she can do will get her Draught of Living Death to turn lilac. It remains resolutely purple. And Slughorn gives the little bottle of Felix Felicis to Harry Potter, whose potion is gleaming and perfect. 

“How did you do that?” Weasley asks him.

“Got lucky, I suppose,” he smirks, glancing back at Malfoy who is simmering with rage. 

Hermione comes of age on the nineteenth of September. She’s never celebrated it at Hogwarts before, but Daphne must have made a note of the gifts her parents sent the year before because this year she wakes up to a pile of presents that includes, for the first time, something from her housemates. A very luxurious winter cloak from Daphne. A carved box with little drawers full of rare Potions ingredients from Theo. And a watch, from Draco Malfoy. She’s seen watches like it on the arms of old students but none so beautiful. It’s made of goblin-wrought silver, with a dark, lapis face, and tiny sparkling stars that tick around the edges. In the note he’s written, _Something very appropriate and traditional for a very inappropriate and untraditional witch._

“Thank you,” she tells him, giving him a hug for the first time. He grins. 

“My mother chose it,” he says. “She said you wouldn’t — that you should have one.” 

“I’ll write to thank her,” Hermione tells him. 

Later, they have a party in the boys’ dorm and even Pansy comes and behaves herself, though she makes a big show of draping herself over Malfoy all evening. They play games and tell stories and they don’t talk about the war. 

Given their vastly increased workload, Slughorn’s weekly dinners, her new and inexplicable interest in Potions Theory, and the way he manages to sit with her at most meals and in almost every lesson they have together, Hermione doesn’t notice that Draco Malfoy starts avoiding her not very long after her birthday, until after their first Hogsmeade weekend, which he doesn’t come to because he’s got detention. 

She goes with Zabini, Greengrass, and Nott. It’s a blisteringly horrible day, and even the long hooded velvet cloak lined with all sorts of charms to keep off both rain and wind she’d bought that summer can’t make it anything but just about bearable. Daphne and Theo peel off to go and pretend they’re not mad for each other and Hermione is with Blaise Zabini. 

The village, it turns out, is quite dull when she’s not spending hours of it learning Defence with Remus Lupin. She misses him. But he’d made an excuse not to come to the village this weekend, so she’s stuck with Zabini. It’s like hanging out with a glacier. 

“This seems to be happening a lot this term,” he remarks. “Shall we go and get drunk?”

“Zabini you say the sweetest things,” she agrees, following him into the Three Broomsticks. The pub is crammed full, everyone seeming to have had the same idea. 

“I’ll go and get us a drink,” he tells her. “If you see a table-"

“I’m fairly sure the one by the fire is going to be free shortly,” she says smoothly. “Probably in about, oh, I should think forty-five seconds.”

He’s actually moved into a grin at this and goes to the bar, returning with a bottle of Madam Rosmerta’s best mead. 

“You’re right you know,” she comments. “We’ve never spent much time together before this year and now you’re always around. It’s Slughorn’s fault, I suppose.”

“It must be nice for you after all that time with Malfoy,” he says snidely. 

This is the moment Hermione realises she hasn’t seen much of Draco. She sips her mead thoughtfully, and enjoys Zabini’s bitching about their peers. He’s not as funny as Malfoy, and too reserved to be really enjoyable company most of the time, but he’s been a useful human shield between her and Cormac McLaggen who seems to think she’s _just_ what his Uncle Tiberius ordered. 

Hermione doesn’t miss Harry Potter coming into the pub looking fit to burn it down and ranting at his friend Weasley, who is gazing at the barmaid. Potter, Longbottom, and Weasley have a heated discussion that she very specifically does not watch. But by not watching him, she gets to see all the girls craning and preening and trying to catch his eye instead. She’s not the only one who’s noticed he’d grown another foot upwards that summer and started to fill out to match it as well. He’s starting to look _heroic_. She hates it. 

“Why does he never come to Slug Club, do you reckon?” Zabini says, following her gaze when it drifts back. “It’s revolting how disappointed the old man looks every week.”

“I dunno, maybe Potter thinks he’s above that sort of thing now he’s the Chosen One,” she mocks. She knows why, but she’s not revealing that to Zabini. “But you’re right. He sits there hoping Potter’ll turn up and you sit hoping that redhead will turn up and I am left to be charmed by that complete arse McLaggen.” 

Zabini gives his coldest sneer, which means she’s about bang on the money. She’s only needling him because she’s so bored. But they stay and eventually Nott and Greengrass turn up and they move on to firewhisky. 

They don’t hear about the attack on Katie Bell until later, and the general consensus in Slytherin is that she must have shagged someone’s boyfriend to be targeted with a cursed necklace. Hermione thinks this seems like a leap, but as she can’t imagine why someone would target Bell she supposes it’s as good a guess as any though the rumours that somehow Harry Potter was on the scene make her suspicious. He seems to have a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time. 

Hermione starts paying more attention to her housemates after that. What she sees is concerning. 

With Voldemort’s return and the constant bad news in the newspapers, including the relatives of more than one student going missing, suspicion and anger are turning on Slytherins. She has to step in to stop some of the smallest students being bullied by other houses far more often than she’d done the year before. People talk in hushed whispers around them. There are hisses and whispers of Death Eater fathers and snakes. Her own year, who’ve always been isolated from Gryffindor, now withdraws from their friends in Ravenclaw too. Teachers award them fewer house points. 

She has a meeting with the other Slytherin prefects. Malfoy doesn’t show. He hasn’t seemed to notice what’s going on. They have another meeting. He doesn’t show up to that either. 

“Granger, we need you to be more prominent outside the house,” Katia Rostova from the year above tells her. “Maybe you know, remind people about your Muggle upbringing more. And for Merlin’s sake get Malfoy under control.”

Hermione’s not sure how she feels about being used as a token to validate a house full of bigots but she also doesn’t like what she’s seeing happening to the younger years so she nods. 

“Malfoy,” Hermione says, a few days later. “I need to talk to you after dinner.” 

It’s not really a request, and he nods. He looks exhausted, she thinks, and wonders where he’s been spending his time. Hermione knows it’s not with Parkinson: she’s taken to working in the Slytherin Common Room most evenings to keep an eye on things and Parkinson is there more often than not. Usually Hermione would go to the library until it closed and then head to the common room but she can’t do that now. 

“You’re ignoring your role,” Hermione says bluntly in the deserted classroom she’s led him into. “I’ve had to step into the breach and it’s getting in the way of my library time.” 

“I’ve got more important things to do than babysit a few first years, Granger,” he snaps. 

“It’s not just that and you know it. We’re in charge — but we have a responsibility to... You _know_ this. I can’t believe I’m having to remind you. You get the best bed and you get to order everyone around but you also have to set an example and protect the reputation of the house. Not something you’ve ever been very good at, admittedly. But it’s more important now than ever.”

“Rubbish,” he says impatiently. “What do we care for the opinions of those idiots?"

“Your usual customary and yet still staggering arrogance aside, Malfoy, it’s a fucking security issue. Firstly, someone’s going to get hurt. People’s families in the other houses are _dying_. And where do they turn to lash out? Us. Secondly, all that nastiness is making our younger students hate the other houses in turn, which is making them be vile, which exacerbates the first issue.”

“Good,” he spits bitterly. “Those people locked up my father. I hope they make them all miserable. I hope they do hate us.” 

“Your father was stupid to get caught,” she says nastily, not bothering to point out that first-year Hufflepuffs had very little to do with the matter, “and given that he did you of all people should be trying to avoid suspicion right now.”

“Let them think what they like,” he says. “Don’t turn into a soft little Mudblood on me now, Granger.”

He storms out slamming the door behind him. He hasn’t called her that in a long time. She wonders if it’s a threat. But he does show up in the common room every night for a few days to sit and work with her. Then he vanishes again. Hermione stops sitting next to him in lessons. He doesn’t seem to care. 

Avoiding Hermione, getting detentions, and skipping out on his prefect duties are all fairly bad indicators that Malfoy wasn’t lying on the train. But then he skips a Quidditch match against Gryffindor. 

“Slughorn’s having a Christmas party,” she tells Theo as they sit watching Ron Weasley play the game of his life. “Want to come with me?” 

“Yeah alright, could be a lark I suppose,” he says idly. “Did Malfoy not want to?” 

“I wouldn’t know,” Hermione says, very deliberately. She wants Theo Nott to know exactly what she’s doing.

Theo’s eyebrows shoot up. 

“A palace coup,” he murmurs. “Well, why not?” 

“Zabini you should bring Greengrass,” Hermione says, turning to him. “Unless someone else has asked you, Daph?”

Daphne looks intrigued. 

“Greengrass,” Zabini says obediently, “would you do me the very great honour of attending the season’s premier event as my companion?” 

Hermione snorts. Daphne says yes. 

Malfoy might think he’s moved on to bigger and better things, Hermione thinks, but he shouldn’t have left his own house undefended. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God you guys are amazing. Thank you for all your very very lovely comments. Thank you to Sally for turning my mundane gold to magical goblin-wrought silver. I want it on record that I did warn everyone about all the eye fucking in the tags. As you'll see Hermione is starting to affect things now. Draco doesn't get to stomp on Harry's face, for example. Partly because without her around to calm Harry down a bit I need to slow that plot line and partly because she is impacting him even though he's made All The Wrong Choices. 
> 
> Next up: palace coups & parties and maybe I'll even let them talk to each other.


End file.
